


Sidewalk Sex

by T Verano (t_verano)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-09
Updated: 2011-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:50:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_verano/pseuds/T%20Verano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim, Blair, sidewalks. Some sex, of sorts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sidewalk Sex

**Author's Note:**

> Heartfelt thanks to:  
> * The lovely and generous people who donated to Moonridge on the fic's behalf.  
> * Jane Davitt for making the (perfect) banner, for the so very helpful beta, and for several years' worth of encouragement and handholding (and for so many other things).  
> * Laurie for cheerleading, suggestions, inspiration -- for helping me keep going, in more ways than I can say.  
> * ma_aaaa for inspiring the fic (and thereby hijacking several years of my life :-)).  
> * Sally MN for being so far above and beyond the gold standard of patience and generosity.  
> * The letter 's', for providing the entirely too tempting alliterative relationship between 'sex' and 'sidewalk'.
> 
> first posted September 20, 2010 (my journals on LJ and DW)

  


                                                      banner art by Jane Davitt

 

  
**  
Sidewalk Sex   
**   


  


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**Sixth Street between Clark and Olympia**   


Sandburg was still fizzing like an over-poured Amstel as Jim steered him through the door ass first, out onto the sidewalk. Jim sighed. Zaki's had always been safe before. Every other time they'd picked up lunch here they'd been waited on by the same squat, dumpy, middle-aged woman, Mildred something or other, a woman who bore a strong resemblance to a five-foot-tall sack of flour.

An AWOL sack of flour. The female behind the counter today had been young, blonde, and bubbly, and built like a Jags cheerleader. Jim had had to propel a backwards-walking, rabidly flirting Sandburg out of the deli by planting a hand in the middle of his chest and pushing him along. If Blair hadn't been carrying the bag with their sandwiches, his butt might've found itself encountering a table corner or two along the way. Denting Sandburg's dignity hadn't been worth risking his Souvlaki Special sandwich for, though; Blair probably would've smacked him with the carry-out bag in retaliation and Zaki's work of genius would've suffered.

A fast-moving hotshot in a suit was heading up the sidewalk straight toward Sandburg, too busy talking high fliers and Dow Jones Industrial on his mobile phone to notice the anthropological ass standing in his way. It was tempting to let fate take its course, but Jim pulled the oblivious and still effervescing idiot out of the suit's path instead. A man had to do whatever he had to do to protect his sandwich.

Sandburg let himself be towed along without appearing to notice that he'd just been saved from being sidewalk kill. He was still running off at the mouth and Jim let his hearing slip away from Sandburg's voice momentarily, back into the deli. The smitten cashier was running off at the mouth too, mooning about Blair's eyes to someone named Frannie — not that Jim intended to share that information even if Sandburg asked for it.

But Blair didn't ask. He just shook himself slightly, like a dog — like the dog that he was — and started down the block. Nearly bouncing.

Talking, a mile a minute. Not about the blonde bimbette behind Zaki's take-out counter anymore, which was refreshing, but something about one of his students. Jim caught up to him in two steps, watching the show more than listening to it. Sandburg was gesturing broadly and too carelessly, with both hands, paying zero attention to the fact that he was holding the sack with their lunch. The breeze trailed his hair intermittently across his face, and the hand that wasn't carrying the sandwich bag kept interrupting the flow of descriptive gestures to tuck the errant hair behind his ears, letting his earrings flash in the pale November sunlight before the hair fought free again.

"Jim!" The bag whacked solidly against his arm. "Are you even listening to me?"

"No. Give me that," Jim said, annoyed. He grabbed the sack away from Sandburg and opened it. If Sandburg had screwed up the structural integrity of his Souvlaki Special —

"Hey, get my gyro out while you're in there, okay? I'm starving." Blair had his hand on Jim's sleeve where he'd hit Jim with the bag, his fingers bunching and smoothing slightly as if he were petting Jim's jacket. He smelled like whichever unnecessary herb or flower his shampoo of the day had featured. He also smelled like the break-room's mediocre version of coffee, and, more faintly, like this morning's kiwifruit and whole-wheat toast.

And like honey. Fuck. Denial wasn't getting any easier.

"Can't you wait till we get back to the station?" Jim asked, taking refuge in the mundane. Sandburg trying to eat one of Zaki's messy masterpieces while walking could only lead to disaster.

Blair's eyebrows rose, then lowered, and he waggled his fingers in an impatient "gimme" gesture.

"Fine," Jim said. "Just keep in mind that you're not getting in the truck if you're wearing any of this sandwich."

Blair didn't even bother to roll his eyes at that. Jim handed him the gyro and started walking more quickly down the sidewalk, leaving him hurrying to catch up.

And talking again, naturally. "Seriously, man," Sandburg said, "nearly naked people cooperating with their gods and each other in an age-old tribal ritual created to sublimate social and sexual aggression — how can Jeff not see the significance of that?" Despite his declaration of imperative hunger Blair hadn't unwrapped his gyro yet; he was back to whatever he'd been going on about before and right next to Jim now, jostling him a little, arm to arm as they walked on down the block. "I mean, we're talking give me a complex here, Jim — I'm not getting anywhere trying to make him understand how crucial the whole pseudo-sexual aspect of that ritual is in explaining the dominance patterns within the entire subculture. I'm just not getting _through_ to him, which, aside from the inherent pity of him missing the whole beautiful point of the thing — and the depressing fact that he thought Anthro 101 would be a no-brainer, not to mention him assuming that whatever small amount of mind he did decide to bring to class didn't need to be open — is making me crazy because I hate failing him like that, you know? That is so not why they pay me the big bucks."

Jim said, jostling back a little himself, "You don't get the big bucks at all, Sandburg, unless you're holding out on me, and in that case we need to talk rent. And maybe wardrobe." The ratty old coat Blair had on made Jim think of homeless shelters. The rips in the jeans, on the other hand… Better not to think about those. At least Blair was wearing long johns underneath them — long johns, Jesus; red fucking long johns — so he was flashing underwear instead of skin.

"Like you have room to talk. Two words, Jim. White — _hokey_ white — socks." Blair whapped Jim on the arm with the back of his free hand before unwrapping a corner of his gyro, totally ignoring the 'rent' comment, not to Jim's surprise. Underneath all the other scents of his body, he smelled musky. _Thank you, Ms. Twenty-Something and Cute and Way Too Friendly._ Easiest motor in town to rev, Jim thought without pleasure, eyeing his twenty-six-year-old going-on-sixteen roommate.

Roommate. Shit. He knew he had masochistic tendencies; this past couple of months' worth of dangling what he shouldn't want to have in front of himself by letting Sandburg bunk in his spare room proved that. Didn't help at all that he knew Blair wouldn't be unwilling. For whatever that was worth; after all, this was Sandburg, the Walking, Talking, Miracle-Gro Libido.

He forced his mind back into the conversation. "Remind me not to let you count anything for me, Einstein," he said. "At least my socks match every day — something your ankles can only dream about. How the hell you can not even notice when you're wearing one blue argyle sock with one solid brown sock, I don't want to know."

Blair huffed dismissively. Then he stopped walking.

Damn. They were passing Albrecht's Used and Rare Books. Or they had been; now Blair was peering in the bookstore window, sandwich still in hand but forgotten, and Jim forgotten too, obviously.

"No, no, no. No. You go in there and you're on your own, and walking back to the station." He should've double-parked in front of Zaki's instead of driving three blocks north in search of a legitimate parking space. If Sandburg went through those doors, he wouldn't come out for hours unless Jim frog-marched him out.

"Like I might not as well be walking back anyway, considering where you parked," Blair muttered, but his attention wasn't on Jim.

"I thought you were starving," Jim reminded him. As if that mattered — Sandburg would rather go into a bookstore than have sex with horny triplets, and mere hunger pains didn't stand a chance. Jim latched onto a corduroy-covered arm and tugged, stepping between Blair and the window and blocking Blair's view of the books.

It worked, surprisingly, and Blair looked down at his gyro with renewed interest. "Oh, right. Right. Yeah," he said, and took a huge bite from the unwrapped corner.

A huge and predictably sloppy bite. And Zaki's was always generous with their tzatziki sauce, so now there was a smear of the sauce on Sandburg's lips and a dribble of it escaping from the corner of his mouth and trailing down toward his chin.

A creamy white dribble.

A creamy, white, viscous dribble.

About which Blair seemed blissfully complacent, looking a little too much the way Jim had imagined he would look after Jim had fucked his so goddamned beautiful mouth within an inch of both of their lives, had just shot an impressive load that Blair hadn't quite managed to swallow entirely.

He couldn't take his eyes off that mouth. And Christ, had he just said "Clean that up for you, Chief?" out fucking loud?

He couldn't have. But the unmistakably suggestive sound of his voice lingered in his ears, and the complacency on Sandburg's face — which hadn't been about Jim's fantasy, shit; it'd been about Zaki's Cascade's-finest gyros, what the fuck had he just done — had turned to utter blankness.

Christ. He needed to play this off, make a joke of it. _Now._ But he just stood there instead, his eyes locked on Sandburg, watching as Blair brought his free hand slowly up toward his mouth. Stood there waiting as Blair asked, stumbling through the words, "What? What are you — Jim, you're saying… Shit. Jim — are you saying what I think you're saying?"

His voice sounded strangled. And ridiculously young. The musk of his scent had jumped exponentially, overwhelming every other scent: gas fumes, motor oil being burnt, the perfume and aftershave and dry-cleaning chemicals and body odors of people walking by, Zaki's handiwork, dog shit and piss, an all-too-near spot some tomcat had recently sprayed…

Sandburg was breathing a little shallowly, through his mouth; Jim could almost see the shape of the air as it moved in and out through his white-smeared lips. After a minute, Blair's hand moved slightly to touch the perfidious tzatziki sauce on his chin and at the corner of his mouth and wipe it off, then he dragged his fingers across his lips and licked both lips and fingers clean. It looked like he wasn't even aware that he was doing it. But he was doing it goddamned slowly.

So goddamned slowly. Jim pulled his stare away from Blair's mouth and fingers with an effort that almost felt like a wrench to his balls. Sandburg's forehead was furrowed in concentration and his eyes were wide, and dark with something that looked a lot like the same uncertainty and lust and — fuck — _hope_ that Jim suspected must be in his own eyes.

Hope. And two blocks back, Sandburg had been surfing another, if apparently lesser, hormonal wave, thanks to the susceptible blonde behind the counter at Zaki's. Easiest fucking motor to rev in Cascade, for Christ's sake.

 _Hope._

Blair hadn't moved since licking his fingers. It was the stillest Jim had seen him all day. Jim looked at the motionless fingers still touching those goddamned lips and then back up at the questioning eyes.

No. They were not going to do this. The lifespan of the typical Sandburg sexual encounter would make a midge feel pity, and there were other reasons too, solid ones, to keep it clean and simple.

Of course, it had never been simple, not from the first time they'd laid eyes on each other. Or even entirely clean. Not really.

But they were _not_ going to do this. No; they were going to keep it clean and simple, as much as it could be.

Safe, as much as it could be.

Oh, fucking _right_. Who was he kidding?

Goddamned fucking tzatziki sauce. Five minutes ago, Jim could have handled this. He could have turned any given slip of his tongue into some kind of dig about Sandburg's overactive and questionable sexual imagination and kept protecting himself, like somebody with some actual goddamned common sense.

Five minutes ago. Two blocks ago. One bookstore window and a single lousy bite of a Zaki's gyro ago.

 _Am I saying what you think I'm saying, Chief?_ "Yeah," he said to Sandburg, "I guess I am."

 

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**Pender Street, 200 block**   


Blair rubbed his palms up and down the sides of his thighs a couple of times as he watched Jim. Riviera must have just told a joke, because Fowler — or was it Flagler? he didn't know too many of the Homicide cops yet — was practically splitting a gut and Jim was grinning broadly at Riviera's illustrating gestures.

He could do this. Sure he could.

But instead of threading his way through the traffic and crossing over to the sidewalk in front of the PD's lobby and joining Jim, standing next to him, getting in on the joke, he rocked back on his heels and rubbed his hands on his thighs again.

Hey, he could just wait for Jim over here on this side of the street. After all, Jim had to know he was here, waiting; Jim had probably been tracking him since he got off the bus at the stop near the corner, could probably hear his stomach growling. And technically, this _was_ meeting Jim in front of the PD to go to lunch. Or it would be when Jim got his ass over here.

And crap, he was pathetic. Seriously high school, and he was going to screw this up one way or another — and right now Jim was probably wondering just what the hell he was doing, lurking over here across the street like this.

But the last time he'd felt this out of control _was_ high school, and he'd certainly screwed up that particular nascent relationship during his brief and socially unstellar career at Franklin High by being less than discreet. And the way he'd felt about Cherise Lamont when he was fourteen had absolutely nothing on the way he felt about Jim Ellison here and now.

But he wasn't fourteen any longer, right? He could do this, and without embarrassing Jim, or even himself. He just needed time to adjust, that was all.

He'd better adjust fast, though, or it was going to put a major crimp in their partnership — association — cop- and observer-ship — or whatever Jim was into calling it this week. If he couldn't even be on the same side of the street as Jim without climbing all over him he'd have to start phoning the ride-along in from down the block, and that wasn’t exactly a plan to be proud of. Or one that would actually work, for either one of them.

 _Climbing all over Jim._ There was a thought he could totally get behind, not that it was doing anything to improve his tenuous hold on the current situation. _Shit._ Blair rubbed his hands along his thighs again. As if _that_ helped.

Oh, great, talk about not helping — a dented Pontiac with "Red Dragon Szechuan" in faded red peel-n-stick letters on the back window had pulled up to the curb in front of him a minute ago and now the driver was walking past with somebody's lunch delivery. The scent of the garlic and ginger and sesame oil and chicken was pretty much going to guarantee that staying on this side of the street would be the better part of valor for the foreseeable future.

As in possibly decades… He swallowed a moan: Jim, Chinese takeout — man, he was screwed for life; he'd never be able to go anywhere in public again. Across the street Jim was still listening to Riviera and grinning, but he'd turned his head briefly to glance at Blair; so much for swallowing the moan. Or maybe Jim had smelled the Red Dragon's Yu Hsiang Chicken, too.

Well, at least now he was sure Jim knew he was here. Here, and waiting dorkily across the street. Like a...dork. With a serious arousal problem.

Somebody closed a car door nearby and he nearly moaned again. The solid thud didn't sound very much like the quiet click of the loft door closing behind Jim last night, but still, it wasn't making things any easier at all to think about doors closing, to think about the door closing behind Jim last night with that very quiet, yet somehow very loud click…

By then he'd been almost certain that Jim had changed his mind, if he'd even really meant it in the first place. He'd wanted to say something — God, he'd wanted to say _something_ , anything — but he hadn't, because Jim hadn't. Not once, all day; it was like nothing had happened outside Albrecht's, like nothing was going to happen, and most of the time Jim hadn't even looked like he was thinking about it.

Then they'd gone home — finally, after the longest seven hours in the history of the planet — and Jim had closed the loft door behind them and leaned back against it and said "Blow me" in a voice that'd pretty much knocked Blair to his knees on its own just from the raw _want_ in it.

Shit, he _had_ to stop thinking about last night.

Like he could. He was so screwed.

The delivery van that'd been blocking Blair's view of Jim and Company for the past thirty seconds edged forward as the light changed on Wilson, and he could see the cozy little group on the opposite sidewalk again. Riviera was still talking. Apparently he wasn't ever going to shut up.

Blair shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and tried to unobtrusively adjust the lay of the land more comfortably. Okay, Jim would probably be smug about getting this reaction without even trying, and relieved that Blair had somehow scraped together enough restraint to not go over there and embarrass the fuck out of him, not to mention blow his cover — or blow _him_ , which would certainly accomplish blowing his cover — so today, now, everything was okay, would be okay, but…

 _But._

But how long would it be before he screwed it up? He always screwed it up. And this time, screwing it up would cost him Jim.

That couldn't happen.

God. That couldn't happen.

He'd never felt like this before when he was starting something, never been so unsure of what to do, of what the other person really wanted. Afraid, yesterday afternoon, that if he said anything at all, he'd be stuffing both his feet into his mouth and talking the whole whatever it potentially was between him and Jim six feet under before it even got started. If it was really going to get started. If Jim had really meant it.

And he'd been ready to jump out of his skin by the time they'd pulled up in front of the loft yesterday evening. Neither of them had been talking about anything by then, not just not talking about _It_ ; both of them just sitting there in the truck in silence with the bags of takeout from Madame Yee's on the seat between them. In tense silence, on Blair's part; he hadn't known what kind of silence on Jim's part.

He hadn't known until Jim had closed the loft door behind them and said, "Blow me," sounding like he might die then and there if Blair didn't.

God. _Jim._

And the bags with the takeout from Madame Yee's had landed on the floor, the cartons of Yu Hsiang Chicken and Kung Pao Tofu tipping over and leaking as he fumbled at Jim's fly, stupidly clumsy with urgency and with the actuality of Jim, like this, of them doing this, really doing this — and he was never going to be able to even walk past a Chinese restaurant again; the smell of Jim, of sex, of star anise and hoisin sauce and chili paste…

The feel of Jim's hands threaded through his hair…

The taste of Jim's dick, sweet and bitter and so good in his mouth; Jim's dick, big and strong and hard, like Jim…and _his_ for a little while, his to taste and tongue and suck, to work, to take care of…

Across the street Jim was still smiling at the other cops, but he'd crossed his arms over his chest the way he did when he'd lost patience five minutes ago but didn't particularly want you to realize it. And Riviera sure wasn't realizing it; he looked like he was starting another story. Shit.

But Jim standing there, his legs spread a little for balance, with his arms crossed like that… Oh, God. Blair's knees ached, metaphorically, to hit the floor again — and not metaphorically.

Maybe they could go back to the loft for lunch.

And maybe this time he wouldn't…Blair felt his face flush. Okay, yeah, coming in his pants last night like a fifteen-year-old had been embarrassing, with his head still nuzzled beside Jim's tongue-damp dick and his hands clutching Jim's thighs, not even touching himself and still shaking like Jell-O trying to ride out a 6.2 on the Richter scale. Although he'd pretty much stopped remembering that he was embarrassed after Jim had hauled him upright — sooner than Blair would've been able to manage it; you really had to admire Jim's well-trained muscles — and fucked the hell out of Blair's mouth with his tongue.

And slowed it down, eventually, and let it become…let it… Blair swallowed hard, looking across the street at Jim. Who'd kissed him like he meant it.

Like he _meant_ it. Blair swallowed a second time. He was back to mindlessly rubbing his palms up and down his thighs — when had he started that again?

The guy from the Red Dragon came back, whistling tunelessly, got in the Pontiac and drove off. Finally, finally, the brothers in blue bonding session on the sidewalk across the street was breaking up — Jim had uncrossed his arms and turned away from Riviera and Flagler-or-Fowler and was walking, jay-walking, toward Blair.

Still smiling. But not the smile he'd been giving Riviera for the past five minutes.

 _Screwed for life._ Oh, God, he probably was. Blair jammed his hands into his jacket pockets and waited for Jim, watching him jog around a Beemer at the tail end of the traffic that was backed up from the light at the corner. Smiling at Blair, like he really meant it.

 

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**University Boulevard between Science Drive and Thomas Harker Court**   


"That wasn't flirting, Jim. I was not flirting."

"Sure you weren't, Chief. What kind of a doormat do you think I am?" Jim kept his voice low. Low, just not very nice — so he'd set himself up for this; it didn't make it any easier to take. They were standing in the middle of the sidewalk and the flow of class-bound students was parting around them like water around a pair of boulders, or around one boulder and one guiltily shifting unanchored rock, and they shouldn't be talking about this at all, not here.

But they were going to anyway.

Sandburg abandoned his pathetic attempt at looking like he was above suspicion and moved on to a self-righteous glare. "Jim, that wasn't flirting; that was being socially supportive. And besides, it's not like _you_ don't ever —"

"'Socially supportive'?" Jim bit off each separate syllable with the derision the words deserved. "I don't think so. Get a fucking bumper sticker if you want to be 'socially supportive'."

"That's beautiful. That's just beautiful, man. Who was it who gushed all over Beverly yesterday about how much he liked her new perfume? Huh, Jim? Tell me that."

"I don't gush. Christ. And you know damn well why we have to keep up appearances at the station. As long as you ride with me, we're not going to be out. You agreed to that."

The self-righteous glare vanished, replaced by something that at least looked like remorse. Not that Jim was buying it for a minute; Sandburg had purely cosmetic repentance down to an art form.

And no fucking sense of proportion about flirting. And just why the hell had Jim expected that to change?

No, _when_ had he started expecting it to change? He'd certainly known, when he was staring at that tzatziki sauce dribbling down Blair's chin a month ago and trying to talk himself into keeping his sanity and his distance, that Blair's approach to intimacy was half Keystone Kops and half Casanova.

And yet sometime during these past weeks, sometime after that first, annihilating — Szechwan-style, Jesus — blowjob, he'd apparently let himself start believing that Casanova had left town. Hell, maybe during it.

Sandburg was standing too still, as still as he'd been on the sidewalk beside Albrecht's bookstore. The untrustworthy regret in his eyes wasn't helping and Jim looked away from it, clamping his jaw. At least traffic on the sidewalk was thinning out, giving them more privacy. The lawn in front of Hargrove Hall was still crowded with students, though, moving across it or standing in small groups and talking.

Animated students. Young, unencumbered, open.

All the things Blair was and that Jim wasn't.

That he couldn't be.

So much for being uncomplicatedly pissed off. Jim sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the ache of tension. His gaze landed on two male students sitting together near the fountain who were holding hands and leaning into each other. They weren't really flaunting it, but they weren't making any effort to hide it, either.

 _Open._ And that was something else he couldn't offer Blair, something Blair could have with anybody else but him.

Fuck. Maybe Blair's regret was real — and not about flirting. Maybe he hadn't done either Sandburg or himself any fucking favor, starting this.

Blair had turned to follow Jim's eyes; now he turned back, and his hand found its way to Jim's chest and planted itself there. "Hey, we do okay," he said, with a thread of urgency in his voice. "Don't stand here second-guessing us." The hand on Jim's chest moved to Jim's arm and wrapped around it. "Don't. So I was flirting — it was just flirting, Jim; it didn't mean anything. I was just being _nice_. Well, that and reflexively responding to culturally conditioned behavioral cues, and I get that I ought to be more aware of what I'm… Crap. That's a crock; I _am_ aware that I'm doing it, but — and I know I'm going to regret telling you this — but I've flamed out so many times, and yeah, I realize I'm being kind of a jerk here, but we're talking self-image, you know? A basic human psychological need for validation of sexual appeal, and it's like, 'Hey, maybe this time I'll be Joe Cool for a change —'"

He looked worried. He'd been going over his lecture notes on the drive to Rainier and hadn't taken his glasses off yet; they'd slid down his nose, which made Jim itch to push them up where they'd be more comfortable. Jim itched to button Blair's coat, too. Blair was shivering a little, but paying no attention to it, uncharacteristically. His hair was pulled back in a fuzzy ponytail, and his ears were growing slightly pink from the cold December air.

"'— instead of being the Eddie Eagle of the human sexual attraction Olympics,' and wham, there I am, automatically giving it my best shot. So it's not anything personal — Okay, that didn't come out the way it was supposed to. I mean I wouldn't act on it; you know that, right? Shit, not that I even _want_ to act on it —"

There was still a faint yellow trace of the bruise on his right temple where that son of a bitch Thompson had hit him last week, half an inch from the thin section of bone that could shatter like glass. Shatter lethally.

"Jim?" The grip on Jim's arm tightened. "Fuck, I'm screwing this up. I knew I'd —"

"No," Jim said. "You're not screwing this up. I am."

"What? No, no. I know I shouldn't keep letting myself fall into that pattern no matter _how_ conditioned a socio-sexual response it is —"

"Chief —"

"— not to mention the whole ego trip aspect, which is so not —"

His fingers pressed harder against Jim's arm, digging against the leather of his jacket sleeve. Jim put his hand on top of Blair's and patted it, which was a piss-poor substitute for yanking Blair into his arms and driving his tongue hard and deep into Blair's mouth, letting it capture his scrambling words until both of them were moaning, and in the same place.

" _Chief_ —"

"— and God, this is where I always fuck everything up. Jim, I swear I —"

Jim shifted his thumb, searching. There. A little pressure, just there on that particular nerve —

"Ow! What the hell did you do that for?" Blair stepped back fast and rubbed his wrist, scowling.

"That wasn't even a pinch, Junior. Suck it up." Better; Sandburg didn't look like he was on the verge of frenzied seppuku now. "And you were losing the circulation in your fingers from the grip of death routine on my arm. Look on it as a service."

The scowl persisted for a moment, then Blair shook his head and grimaced. "Sorry," he said. But not like he was searching for the ritual knife, just an ordinary 'sorry'. Whether it was about Jim's arm or about flirting didn't really matter. Not as much as it'd mattered a few minutes ago, anyway.

"Yeah," Jim said. He knew he was smiling a little, which probably made him certifiable. Sandburg was going to keep flirting too much; the job wasn't going to change any time soon, not about the extra risk there could be to Blair if backup ever came a little late to help a faggot cop and his ass-buddy; and hell, any faint fucking hope of keeping things sane and simple in his life had jumped out of the C-130 without a chute four weeks ago, two blocks north of Zaki's. 'Certifiable' was understating it. But here and now, Blair was standing in front of him and looking like he wasn't planning on going anywhere any time soon, and that was worth all the rest.

"Ow," Blair said again, rubbing his wrist, but it was only an offhand grumble. He was still shivering a little and still ignoring his unbuttoned coat. His ears had grown pinker. From the cold, right now, but this morning his ear been pink from Jim's tongue and teeth, had stayed faintly pink to Jim's eyes all the way to the station and well into one of Simon's briefings — especially right where those silver hoops met skin…

Jim's voice came out sounding a little hoarse. "Didn't I see you wear an earring once that was some kind of chain or something, Chief?"

Blair seemed puzzled for a moment, studying Jim's face. And then he swallowed, his tongue briefly tracing his lower lip, as he raised his hand to his ear and his fingers brushed the metal hoops. "Uh, yeah, you could have," he answered, and flushed. And not from embarrassment or the cold, from the scent of him; he was either remembering Jim's attack on his ear this morning while he was sitting at the table muttering into his coffee and shuffling distractedly through a pile of papers, or anticipating the tug of Jim's teeth on that short silver chain later on.

Both, hopefully.

There'd been something dangling from the end of that chain…

A peace sign. Of course.

Jim felt his smile widen into a grin. Sandburg looked good this color, a teaser for the darker flush his dick would be sporting tonight. And tonight, Jim could take his time, do everything he wanted to. And he would.

Fuck, yeah.

"Okay," Blair said. "So we're okay, right?" He licked his lower lip again. "Shit, I wish you didn't have to get back and I didn't have a class in ten minutes." So did Jim. Sandburg flushed, his lower lip wet and almost imperceptibly swollen where his teeth had clamped down on it for a moment; smelling like anticipation and arousal —

And like honey, the way he always did…

And, somehow, like this morning's laughter. Laughing protest, that there wouldn't be time, and there hadn't been time, and Blair had groused all the way out of the apartment and down to the truck. Then he'd put his hand on Jim's arm and left it there, fingers smoothing up and down over the leather of Jim's jacket sleeve, until they got to the PD parking garage.

The second button below the collar of Sandburg's rumpled flannel shirt had kept catching Jim's eye off and on during the morning: tilting forward dangerously from the buttonhole, threads loosened…helped along, no doubt, by Jim's arm, earlier, rubbing across Blair's chest as he rolled Blair's nipple ring beneath his palm while his teeth worried at the earrings in Blair's earlobe.

He hadn't pointed out the precarious state of the button to Sandburg. After all, it wasn't like he kept a needle and thread in his desk drawer.

And Sandburg hadn't needed to go off in search of button-sewing-on help, either, which he undoubtedly would've found.

"Eddie 'The Eagle', huh?" Jim said now, because Blair did have a class in ten minutes and a notoriously inflexible ADA was expecting Jim in thirty-five minutes for a review on the Felder case. "Yeah, I can see the resemblance." He moved a step to stand right beside Blair on the sidewalk, put a casual hand on Blair's wrist, and smoothed the side of his thumb over the spot he'd pressed against earlier.

"Hey, I admitted it. You don't need to rub it in," Blair said. "And glass houses, my friend — 'Vera, you smell just like my grandmother' — that ring a bell?" He looked happy again, like he'd looked this morning.

The sidewalk had nearly emptied of students. Across the winter-brown lawn behind Blair's shoulder the blond kid with the Don Johnson-wannabe stubble on his cheeks had his hand on the other kid's thigh. Just resting there passively, but clearly proprietary as hell.

Jim could relate to that.

"Knew if I ticked Vera off she'd give you extra grief over the paperwork you had to fill out to start riding along. It's an old PD initiation rite," he said, mostly to watch Sandburg's reaction when he said it.

"An old rite you just made up five seconds ago." Sandburg's hands spread dismissively in a gesture that was nearly as entertaining as the appreciative disparagement spreading across his face. The open edge of his coat brushed across the unstable button on his shirt and the button trembled, then surrendered to destiny, parting company with Sandburg's flannel. "Vera would have you guys for breakfast if you were… Hey, is that my button?" Frowning, Blair held out his hand for the small circle of blue plastic Jim had just picked up from the sidewalk.

"Nope," Jim answered. "Mine." And watched Blair flush again, slowly, after his gaze went from the button between Jim's fingers down to his own chest and the empty threads dangling from the lapel of his shirt, up to Jim's eyes, and stayed there, pupils beginning to dilate.

Same page. Good.

Five minutes until Blair's class now, and if he didn't hit the street soon himself, he'd have to use the siren to get to that meeting with the ADA on time. Dredging up enough willpower from somewhere, Jim turned his back on the expression on Blair's face and started toward the parking lot. Without looking over his shoulder, he said, "Find that earring tonight, huh?" and walked on toward the truck, listening to Blair's breath catch and his heartbeat speed up. Yep, the same page. And then Blair must have realized the time, because he muttered "Shit!" and his footsteps took off at a run toward the building.

Missing a button. Jim turned the button over between his fingers, smiling, as he headed back to the job.

 

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**Clark Avenue, 600 block**   


"You're kidding, right?" Blair stared at Jim in disbelief. Stared at the back of Jim's coat, actually, since Jim was still heading down the block toward Macy's while Blair had stopped short in the middle of the sidewalk. Somebody bumped into him from behind with a curse — with several curses in different voices; the sidewalk was crowded, although apparently with people who hadn't paid any attention to what Jim had just said or they wouldn't all still be so preoccupied with Four More Shopping Days Until Christmas. Blair threw a quick apology over his shoulder and took off after Jim.

Okay, there was a little potential hero-worship in there along with the disbelief. Not even Racko the Unrivaled, whose legendary holiday partying had birthed Rainier's underground Hall of Shameless Fame, could've pulled off what Jim had just — strongly — implied he'd succeeded in doing at what surely should've gone down in history as the Great Christmas Party of '85.

 _Gone down._ Blair snorted at that as he wound his way through the moving maze of shoppers. Crap, he was never going to make it through even the most boring Christmas party again with a straight face and a circumspectly quiescent dick, even if Jim was just making it all up.

Which he probably was. Of course he was.

"You've _got_ to be kidding," Blair said again, catching up to Jim and grabbing his arm.

Jim favored him with one of his patented Ellison as Enigma expressions. "I don't kid about mistletoe, Sandburg."

"In that case, maybe we should stop at a tree lot on the way home and pick some up," he said, raising his eyebrows at Jim. Maybe Jim _wasn't_ kidding. Blair could hope, anyway. Jim's lips quirked and Blair let go of Jim's arm so he could backhand Jim's chest encouragingly. "There's gotta be more, man. Give."

Jim sent a pointed glance around at the shoppers thronging the sidewalk in all directions and then back at Blair. "That's all you're getting."

"Better not be," Blair answered, raising his eyebrows a little higher and lowering his voice.

The quirk of Jim's lips turned into a grin. "Here, anyway. Later…that depends."

"Depends on —" Something with a sharp corner poked into Blair's arm from behind and pushed him into Jim. Right against Jim's chest. Into Jim's arms — sort of, anyway. Close enough. "Hi," he said under his breath, angling his head back to look up into Jim's face. "Blair Sandburg; nice to meet you. How you doing?"

Even through their heavy winter coats, Blair could feel Jim's laughter. It wasn't as good as in bed, sure; not nearly as good as lying in bed using Jim's naked, work of art chest as a pillow and feeling Jim's laughter skin on skin, but it was good. So was the teasing grind Jim had just given to his hips, too brief and subtle for anybody to notice except for Blair, on the receiving end — or the receiving front, to be technically correct — before Jim slid his arm up to hook around Blair's neck for a second and pull him in even closer. Then he spoiled it by evading Blair's attempt to bat his hand away and ruffling Blair's hair before letting Blair go.

Public sidewalk; yeah, Blair got that.

But at least Jim's hand had landed on Blair's shoulder after he'd messed up Blair's hair and was still there, tightening a little when they got jostled by a passing shopper. That was…nice. To a certain degree it had to be self-defense on Jim's part, considering the elbows and packages and other hazards moving past their little two-person obstructionary island in the middle of the sidewalk, but it was still nice.

A snatch of conversation floated past them, a couple of guys arguing about how the Jags' offence stacked up against the Sonics' defense last year, and Blair took in an unplanned deep breath, suddenly even more aware of Jim's hand on his shoulder.

And Jim's grip had just tightened again. _God._ And here they were, on a crowded sidewalk, with errands to run and the truck three blocks back in the Fifth Street parking garage and way too many people everywhere.

At least Jim was thinking about last night too. He had to be, right? About the way last night had started, in the elevator, the first time they'd gotten home — if you could call riding up in the elevator and unlocking the door just in time to answer the phone and head out again 'getting home'.

"You know what," he said, not looking at Jim, "we ought to take the phone off the hook when we get back to the loft. And maybe you could leave your cell phone in the truck?"

"Maybe." Jim's voice was amused.

Maybe. Right. Amused, right. Jim hadn't been very amused last night at getting that off-duty but who gives a crap summons at that particular moment.

Neither had Blair, for that matter. Especially since he wasn't any closer to being able to get a murder victim out of his head right away than he'd been when he first started working with Jim, and getting home the second time hadn't been anything like getting home the first time. It'd just been him and Jim propping up their respective walls in the elevator, then taking their respective showers and heading for their respective sides of the bed. Which wasn't at all what Jim had wanted earlier — and maybe had still wanted even then — but it was all Blair could deal with.

That, and Jim sliding over behind him after a while without saying a word, just lying close behind him and eventually falling asleep with his breath slow and steady and warm against the back of Blair's head. He'd been able to deal with that.

But shit, the next time Jim started anything on the elevator on the way up to the loft they were going to finish it, even if they had to pull the stop button on the elevator and force Mrs. Fulmer in 204 to take the stairs if she wanted to go out to hit the bingo halls. Exercise was supposed to be good for her bad knee, anyway.

"You really want to do this tonight?"

Jim didn't? And his hand was gone from Blair's shoulder. Fuck, he knew he'd blown it last night for Jim, but —

But Jim wasn't looking at him; he was staring at the roiling sea of shoppers with an expression that said he'd like to personally arrest every one of them. That was a relief. Maybe not for the shoppers, but as long as all Jim was avoiding was Macy's it was a relief for Blair. He shrugged. "Hey, it's your Christmas shopping, not mine," he said. "It doesn't matter to me whether you finish it or not."

"It doesn't?" Now Jim's voice was amused again, and lower than before, and maybe he _wasn't_ talking about shopping.

He'd better not be. "Only as far as it affects me personally," Blair answered, which was fishing, admittedly, but —

"Oh, it does." Jim said. "Trust me."

"Then I'm all for finishing."

Jim smiled. "That's what I thought."

"So?" Blair said, after waiting more than long enough for Jim to do something besides stand there smiling out across the crowd of shoppers he'd looked like he wanted to arrest a few minutes ago. "We going to finish any time soon?"

Jim's smile widened and he looked directly at Blair. And Blair still hadn't gotten used to Jim looking at him like that — and he would _never_ get used to Jim looking at him the way he had last night in the elevator — and it was hard to believe he hadn't screwed this up yet, driven Jim to pack up his stuff and set it outside the loft door and suggest he consider relocating to the farthest reaches of the Kalahari.

But the way Jim was looking at him right now, Blair didn't think any part of the Kalahari was even remotely on his mind.

He cleared his throat. "So," he said to Jim again, shooting for casual, "you think Myerson has any clue at all about anything besides cutting costs? He's hamstringing the coaching staff; they get a couple of injuries and the roster won't have the depth to bail them out and there goes the season."

Which was just about where he'd left off last night in the elevator. Only he'd been pretty wound up during the walk from the truck to the lobby to the elevator — Myerson was the kind of management asshole the Jags needed like a hole in the head — and Jim crowding him back against the elevator wall the moment the doors closed behind them had come out of absolutely nowhere, unless trash-talking the NBA had suddenly started getting Jim hot. _Very_ hot. He'd stood there like he was paralyzed, with Jim's hands cradling his face and his thumb tracing Blair's lips, silenced mid-sentence by the look in Jim's eyes.

Now Jim's hand was on his shoulder again, turning him back toward the parking lot and giving him a little push. So maybe trash-talking the NBA _did_ get Jim going. Blair said, without looking back at Jim, "We're doing the phone thing tonight, right?"

"Maybe," Jim said behind him.

Meaning yes, if he was any judge of the tone of Jim's voice. "You heard the rumor that Myerson's about to get canned?" he asked, still without turning around, and he grinned to himself when the grip on his shoulder tightened and Jim started walking faster in spite of the shoppers clogging the sidewalk.

"Save it until we get home, Chief."

Or back in the elevator. And this time they were pulling the stop button. Mrs. Fulmer really did need the exercise.

 

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**Blaine Street, 500 block; Ninth Street between Blaine and Akron**   


At least it wasn't raining. If it had been, especially a good, hard, driving rain, he might've given in to the temptation to grab a booth in Renfro's right now, settle in and enjoy some draft, and get the kitchen started on an order of their giant onion rings. Wait for his cell phone to ring, for Sandburg's "Jim?" to hit his ear carrying equal parts question and impatience. Safe bet that by then the basket of onion rings would've been sitting in front of him long enough to be half demolished and he'd be on his second draft, and he wouldn't have the first fucking qualm about telling Blair not to drown on the two-block walk from the library to Renfro's door.

As it was, it was a temptation anyway, even if the weather was dry and mild for January and nicer than Sandburg deserved for that two-block walk. After all, he knew damn well Sandburg wouldn't be waiting outside the library like he'd promised. He'd still be inside, nose-deep in a stack of books, and Jim would have to track him down by following the complex scent — complex on the surface, simple underneath — that said 'Blair', follow it up and down half a dozen staircases and through a maze of shelves and study carrels until he acquired the target. S.O.P.

What he'd do with the target once he'd acquired him was still up for grabs, but venting some justifiable irritation sounded appealing. _"I'll be waiting outside, Jim. Fifteen minutes. I swear, man. Cross my heart."_ Blair always promised that, and he had yet to make good on it when a library was involved. Past time for Jim to get a little of his own back.

So tonight Sandburg was either going to have to wait on him while he took his time relaxing in Renfro's — and watch him work his way through a substantial amount of deep-fried, artery-clogging bar food — or find alternative transportation back to the loft. Which wasn't that likely, since taxis were usually too big a stretch for the Sandburg wallet and he knew from Blair's previous complaints that the bus schedule at this hour of a Saturday evening was lousy.

Of course, Sandburg could also just haul out a book while Jim ate, which meant he'd be too caught up in whatever it was he was reading to even notice Jim fucking over his cholesterol levels, much less get worked up about it. Or he could claim a seat at the bar near the TV and watch ESPN instead of watching Jim. Or watch Renfro's other customers.

'Watch', hell; more like flirt his ass off. _Fuck._

The alluring smells from Renfro's were half a block behind him now and Jim sighed as he walked on toward Ninth. At any rate, he was being practical for once, not suckered into making a pointless drive-by past the library's front door but saving time by snagging the first likely parking spot he'd found. That it was close to Renfro's was a bonus he still might decide to make use of. He ought to be able to find some way to come out ahead here, for Pete's sake — five years of tactical experience in Covert Ops and a couple of years spent in mostly getting the better of some of Cascade's more devious criminal minds had to be worth something, even when dealing with Sandburg.

Jim rounded the corner and sent a desultory glance toward the library entrance halfway down the next block. And stopped, frowning.

Shit, Blair had actually meant it this time. He was waiting outside. Nose in a book, predictably, but waiting outside like he'd promised.

The library must've closed early for some reason and kicked him out. Either that, or he'd run across a disgruntled ex from one of the many so-called — and generally disastrous — relationships he'd had during the first few months Jim had known him and had made a strategic retreat. It was too much to hope for that he was waiting outside because he'd stopped taking Jim and his reliable F-150 for granted.

But whatever the reason, he _was_ waiting outside, sitting cross-legged on one of the wide granite platforms flanking the library steps, in the middle of a pool of bright yellow light from the library's floodlights and a nearby streetlight. His backpack was lying on the platform just behind his ass — he didn't even have a hand on the strap, for God's sake — and his head was down, bending forward over the book resting on his thighs. And it was one thing for him to not pay any attention to what was going on around him when he was inside a library or somewhere else relatively safe, even if what he wasn't paying attention to was Jim, but after dark on a city street, looking like he might as well be advertising for muggers? Christ.

Jim was cutting down the distance between them at a respectable speed before he realized that he'd started walking again. He'd gone into automatic cop mode as well, broadening and blurring the focus of his sight a little to scan for suspicious activity, anything breaking the pattern. And maybe there was such a thing as automatic sentinel mode, too — damned if he'd ever tell Sandburg about that, though — since he'd tuned into the sounds around Sandburg without thinking about it, listening for incriminating conversation or the increased heart rate and respiration of someone about to engage in adrenaline-spiking unlawful activity.

For once Cascade didn't live up to its reputation. The scattering of pedestrians in the vicinity all remained peaceful and law-abiding, and Jim slowed as he approached the library steps. Slowed and stopped a couple of yards away, even though he'd intended to keep moving until he was in position to flick the side of that bent head lightly with the back of his hand and startle the crap out of his partner, in the undoubtedly vain hope that Sandburg would get the point and be a little more careful next time.

Apparently it didn't matter what he'd consciously intended. His subconscious had other things on its mind.

And he couldn't blame it. Because _Christ_ — as usual, Blair might as well be making out with the book he was reading. Making out, and about two practiced back-seat moves away from fucking it, the way he was eating it with his eyes like the two of them had passed the point of no return and it was only a matter of time now. The way he was murmuring to it — encouragement, approval, disapproval, frustration, passionate agreement: _talk dirty to me, baby_ — and the way his hands held the cover, smoothed over the pages, teased the paper, toyed with it. The way he was cradling the book with his thighs and letting it crowd up to the part of his anatomy that was currently putting out a little extra musk solely on the book's behalf…

It was enough to make anthropology actually arousing, goddammit.

The discussion he'd intended to have with Sandburg about paying attention in potentially dangerous surroundings could wait. So could the onion rings — until the next time Blair stood him up, anyway. Right now he had a taste for something else, a very definite taste for claiming all this single-minded Sandburg focus for himself. Transference, so to speak, if you wanted to minor in psychology.

He crossed the remaining distance between them so that he was standing right beside Blair and the object of his attentions. "Chief," he said, which got him all of a surprised lifting of Blair's head, a preoccupied, "Hey," and then an upraised palm accompanying, "Just let me finish this paragraph, okay? I can't believe he's blowing off Jimpson's field study in '73 — that was landmark; he can't seriously just ignore all of Jimpson's conclusions…" and Blair's head dipping down again toward the book as his voice trailed away.

Jim sighed. "Chief," he said again, picking up the backpack and reaching for Sandburg's shoulder — get Blair moving, he wouldn't be able to keep reading in the relative darkness a few steps down the block. "Save the rest for later; let's go home. There's something I want to do."

"Huh?" Blair muttered. Short odds that he didn't even realize yet that he was up and walking down the sidewalk, being steered by Jim's hand on his shoulder. "But what about Karoly? Okay, the methodology was controversial, but still —"

 _Talk dirty to me, babe._ Not exactly like that, no. But give Blair the fifteen-minute ride back to the loft with Jim's hand taking over the book's earlier, favored location, and Jim might not even have to hide the damn book when they got home. And the words coming out of Blair's mouth wouldn't be meant for the goddamn book, they would be for Jim; the kind of talk that drove Jim wild, not the kind of talk that could drive him crazy.

"Jim?" Blair said, looking up from the book he'd been holding closer and closer to his face as they left the pool of light from the streetlight and the library entrance behind. "Hey, when did you get here?"

"Just keep walking, Sandburg," Jim said, dropping his hand from Blair's shoulder to confiscate the book.

Crazy, wild. Two sides of the same coin.

S.O.P.

 

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**Beekman Avenue, 100 block**   


"Jim!" An alto voice, feminine and sexy; Blair stopped talking mid-syllable and turned around. Jim was two steps behind him already, standing still and looking back down the block.

No, walking back down the block, toward a spectacularly beautiful woman who was staring at Jim with an intimate smile that made Blair's stomach muscles curl in on themselves.

"Danielle," Jim said, sounding pleased, and then he was nearing her and she had a hand outstretched, reaching for him. Jim moved forward and they weren't politely shaking hands, crap, no; she was pulling him into a hug and saying something, her mouth right next to Jim's ear.

And Jim was hugging her back and laughing. _That_ laugh; the low, caressing laugh that always coiled instantly, insistently, around Blair's dick — and the rest of him, God — the laugh that meant…that was… That laugh was private, dammit. Theirs. His and Jim's. Not Jim's and somebody else's.

Especially somebody so beautiful, shit. He couldn't see Jim's face, but hers, angled over Jim's shoulder, her lips still beside Jim's ear, was depressingly drop-dead beautiful.

Okay, Jim had a past. He knew Jim had a past. It was _past_. Right? Jim was with him now. Jim wanted to be with _him_. He knew that. Of course he knew that.

Even if Jim had just laughed like that, with her. And even if their hug was lasting fucking forever.

Two women stopped right in front of where Blair was standing, blocking his view while one of the women rummaged around in her purse for something. And crap, he probably looked like an idiot craning his neck to try to see around two women and one large purse instead of just moving enough so he could see — or instead of just walking over there, like a rational, socially competent human being — but his feet seemed to be temporarily stuck to the sidewalk. And he needed to _see_ — what if Danielle was kissing Jim right now? Was she kissing Jim? Was Jim kissing her? Jim wouldn't kiss her, would he?

What if Jim was kissing her? What if —

The woman found whatever she was looking for and she and her friend moved on, and okay, nobody was doing any kissing. Not now, anyway. And Jim and Danielle were unhugging, finally. Separating —

Well, _Jim_ was pulling back, anyway. Slightly.

Okay, that was good, Jim was pulling away from her; you could at least slide a piece of paper between their bodies now, maybe even two pieces —

But they were laughing again, both of them. Blair couldn't quite make out the words Jim was saying, not from here, just the tone of his voice and the low prowl of his laughter. And he should _join_ the two of them. He should, right? Unstick his feet from the cement and just walk up to them; Jim would introduce him — Jim would _remember_ him, wouldn't he? Remember him, still want him, still…

Shit, she was beautiful. Leggy. Classy. And she had the kind of body language that said "Jim's league" and "I'm wearing black lace underwear" and — God, with Blair's luck — "wildcat in bed, best sex you've ever had".

'Danielle'. She would be silk and cream and…crap, fur, maybe; he could see that, and soft in the right places, and sleek: sleek dark red hair, sleek soft-firm breasts. And she was tall, almost as tall as Jim, and laughing at whatever Jim had just said, laughing low in her throat, sexy as hell, even from here Blair could hear that, and her mouth was wide and beautiful and perfect — and whoa, her eyes had just dropped to Jim's crotch like they had a staked claim on the territory.

Screw that. No more standing over here graciously giving them a little space — okay, standing over here with all the mobility of a parking meter, wallowing in insecurity — that crotch was _his_. Jim had turned a little as he'd pulled back from the hug and Blair could see them both from the side now, and he could see Danielle putting her palm on Jim's chest. Perfectly manicured fingernails, probably, to go with the perfect rest of her; fingernails that had probably left marks on Jim's back, when she and Jim had —

Blair stopped walking before he'd even started. Jim had put his hand on Danielle's wrist. And he was just keeping his hand there on her wrist as her palm stayed right where it was, despite knowing at least three hundred and fifty different GI Joe fucking Friday moves that he could've used to dislodge her completely unnecessary hand from his chest instantly without breaking a sweat. He'd tilted his head to the side at the particular angle that always meant he was looking at you with his eyes crinkled half-shut in amused pleasure — looking at _Danielle_ in amused pleasure — and Blair could see the quirk of Jim's lips from here, the quirk that always made Blair want to do anything he could to tease those lips into an all-out Ellison grin.

Danielle looked like she was more than willing to tease, too. And deliver.

Jim was still watching her, his head tilted at that angle, smiling.

And Blair was invisible, apparently.

Or immaterial. Okay — he was definitely abandoning his impression of a parking meter and walking over there right now. It wasn't like being uninvited had ever stopped him before, for cripe's sake.

Right. He was walking over there and putting his hand on Jim's arm — or putting his hand in Jim's pants pocket and giving a good tug — and smiling nicely at Danielle and stuffing her and _her_ hand into a cab. One going to the airport, preferably. He'd be happy to cough up the fare.

She was shaking her head at something Jim had said, and the sleek red hair was swinging smoothly. Jim would love that hair; hair that didn't fly all over the place and get in his eyes and his mouth at the wrong moments, hair that was perfectly behaved and wantonly seductive at the same time. Non-neo-hippie hair.

Jim was still smiling and she was laughing again. At least Jim wasn't holding her wrist any longer, about fucking time, and she'd just dropped her hand — about fucking _time_ — and seriously, he was walking over there right now to join them even if he had to leave his stupidly stuck shoes behind, because the half-pouting smile she was giving Jim now was _way_ too —

And when he walked over there and stood there, shoelessly, next to Danielle, he wouldn't even have to open his mouth to be saying, "Hey, Jim — look at what you have now compared to what you used to have. Lucky you, huh?"

'Lucky', right. Shit. Rubbing Jim's nose in the less than subtle differences between him and Danielle was totally the plan of the decade.

Funny how Jim always got bent out of shape about Blair's dating past — his overly prolific dating past, according to Jim — and didn't have a clue that Blair didn't really _have_ a past, not one for Jim to get jealous about, anyway. Nothing that counted.

Not like Jim. Jim had a past — a _real_ past. Jim had been loved, more than once.

Had _been_ in love. More than once.

Oh, God — what if he'd been in love with Danielle?

He _knew_ Jim. When Jim fell in love with a woman he never really fell out of love with her again — unless she was Carolyn — and what kind of chance did Blair seriously have against female and perfect and still having a torch carried for her?

Female and perfect. Face it; what kind of chance did he really have even if it hadn't been love, just a friendly — and incredibly goddamn erotic — fuck? With Danielle, any 'Danielle', Jim could be as public as he wanted to be, and sure, Jim was private about a lot of things, he had to be, but he knew Jim didn't like having to be private about who he was _with_ , and with Danielle he could —

She was leaving.

Finally.

Thank God. Leaving town, maybe; getting into that taxi at the curb and heading to Cascade International and boarding a plane bound for Outer Mongolia with a one-way ticket, taking up life in a yurt. Or McMurdo Station. Yeah, Antarctica would be good, somewhere she had to wear twelve layers of subzero-survival-rated down-filled clothing, around the clock, and —

Jim was coming back; walking back, smiling, to where he'd left Blair when Danielle had happened. So he hadn't completely forgotten Blair's existence.

Or at least he'd remembered it now, now that Danielle's perfect derriere – hypothetically perfect, sure, at least to Blair, since she'd been wearing a coat; although there wasn't any hope at all there was anything hypothetical about it to Jim — was planted in a Checker Cab heading down Beekman toward, if the universe was kind, the airport. And penguins.

"I didn't know Danielle was in town," Jim said as he came up beside Blair, still smiling bemusedly. "Haven't seen her for years. She used to be… Damn." His expression changed to mild chagrin. "I should've introduced you. Sorry, Chief. I didn't even —"

"Hey, no problem," Blair interrupted. The possible endings for that sentence — "I didn't even remember you were there…were alive on this planet…are the person I'm currently sharing the sheets with" — weren't anything he was ready to hear right now. And crap, he should be pissed off here, and letting Jim know about it, but what if… What if Jim…

'What if', yeah. He swallowed. "You ready for lunch?" he asked as he turned to look down the block toward Federico's, where they'd been heading before Jim's past — please let it be his past, not his future, not any time soon or fucking _ever_ — had run into them.

And crap…Federico's was exactly the kind of place Jim would've taken Danielle for lunch. Or for dinner; candle-lit and quiet and romantic.

Jim could be so fucking good at being romantic.

And with Danielle, Jim could have put his hand over hers on the table for everybody at Federico's to see, and left it there for long, sweet, unhurried minutes without raising any eyebrows, left it there while he did that subtle thing with his thumb caressing the sensitive skin between her thumb and index finger, until she was biting her lip and breathing faster and every nerve in her body was on fire —

A hand settled on his shoulder, fingers brushing his neck, and squeezed gently. Jim cleared his throat. "They've got that portabella pasta stuff you like on their specials board," he said, squinting down the block toward Federico's window against the angle of the January sun, while his hand stayed on Blair's shoulder. His thumb moved, under Blair's hair, stroking back and forth lightly.

 _God._

"Let's go eat, Chief. I'm getting hungry." Of course he was, after Danielle, damn it. Jim's thumb was still leaving short trails of sparks against Blair's neck, and Blair nodded just barely, not wanting to lose contact with the touch. "You're biting your lip," Jim added quietly. He sounded amused.

And a little predatory. Okay, that was good. Something to work with. "Rather it be you, man," Blair answered under his breath. And got the all-out grin, which somehow managed to look predatory, too, and which Danielle hadn't gotten. At least not this time, anyway.

"Oh, it will be. Count on it," Jim said. The grip on Blair's shoulder tightened briefly and Jim's thumb gave a final caress to Blair's neck before his hand shifted to the small of Blair's back and nudged him to start walking toward Federico's. "You know," Jim went on, as they headed down the block, "you do jealous worth shit. I could give you some pointers, brush up your technique."

The jerk. Blair stopped walking.

The smug, Machiavellian, sure of himself, Danielle-hugging _jerk_.

The devious, manipulative —

"Lunch, Sandburg. I'm buying."

Jim hadn't stopped walking. Wasn't looking back; he'd only half-turned his head to speak. So sure of himself. So sure Blair would follow.

And fuck, Jim was right. He wasn't off the hook, the six-foot dick — shit, no — but he was right. Blair _was_ following him, had started walking again, following him without even thinking about it.

Like he should be surprised by that — if he was honest with himself, he wasn't any more surprised than Jim was, which was clearly not one fucking bit.

Which didn't mean Jim was off the hook, the two-faced, supercilious, "I should've introduced you" prick.

He glared at the back of Jim's neck. "'Buying'? You got _that_ right, you jerk," he muttered as Jim reached Federico's doorway and pulled the door open. "Not that lunch is all you're going to be paying for."

Jim turned his head and threw Blair a look — not exactly apology, more like challenge: Jim on the basketball court saying, "Bring it, Magic," with a light in his eyes that always made Blair cheat shamelessly and blatantly, anything to get them off the court faster and back home sooner — and Blair's stomach muscles curled in on themselves again.

Just not the same way they had a few minutes ago.

God, he did do jealous worth shit. _Bring it._ Right. He took a deep breath and let it out — without any useful effect, as far as he could tell — and followed Jim into the restaurant. For lunch.

To start with.

 

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**East Walton Street, 900 block; Anstruther Avenue**   


Jim turned his back on the flashing lights and gradually dispersing chaos of the scene. The three perps had been turned over to Patrol to be ferried to lockup and he'd handled everything he'd needed to here; the shitload of paperwork this bust would entail would wait.

Something else wouldn't.

He looked down the block to where Sandburg stood, leaning against the granite-faced side of an office building and staring down at his feet. Or staring at one foot, since the other was propped against the wall behind him. He looked bedraggled.

He looked _alive_.

No, this wouldn't wait.

He headed down the sidewalk toward Sandburg. Toward the sidewalk past Sandburg, in point of fact — he let his peripheral vision track the slight tremors of leftover adrenaline still running through Sandburg's body and the inch-long up and down rubbing of Sandburg's hand along his thigh, the clouds of fog from Sandburg's deliberately paced breaths in the cold February morning air, but he kept his focus farther down the block and didn't look at Blair directly, not when he approached him, and not when he passed him. Looking at Blair directly right now would be like pouring gasoline on a fire.

And Blair would follow him, anyway; Jim didn't need to look at him or say anything to him, for Blair to follow him.

Goddammit.

"Hey." Blair's voice came from behind Jim's back, along with the squelch of his wet Nikes and the rustle of his coat as he hurried after Jim. "You done?" Now he was beside Jim, his hair still flattened from the rain earlier this morning and his shoulders a little hunched: cold, adrenaline depletion, maybe something else. The knuckles on his right hand were grazed; Jim didn't know, yet, when that had happened. But he'd find out.

"Jim? We done here?" Blair asked again.

Fucking stupid question.

"We're done _here_." Jim kept his eyes on the sidewalk ahead of them. "But we're not done."

He heard Sandburg swallow, almost a gulp. Not surprising, considering; he knew what his voice had sounded like, saying that. And Blair was a bright enough guy to know he hadn't been referring to finishing things up at the station.

"Ah, okay," Blair said. "So we're going back to the truck?"

He didn't answer Sandburg, just kept walking toward Anstruther, where he'd left the F-150 what could've been a lifetime ago.

A hand grabbed his elbow. He didn't slow down or turn and the hand let go, which was goddamn fortunate for both of them; even through the leather of his jacket sleeve Sandburg's touch was incendiary. But it wasn't a reprieve — in another moment Sandburg was in front of him on the sidewalk, facing him, a hand reaching toward his chest to stop him.

Jim said, "Not here," with every ounce of control he could manage.

"I know," Sandburg said quickly. "Jim, I _know_. Me, too." It was impossible not to look directly at him now, and gasoline dumped onto a fire didn't come close to it.

"Then don't fucking touch me." Jim let that come out sounding entirely like hard, cold rejection and watched the wave of hurt flow through Blair's eyes — and Christ, he was a manipulative son of a bitch, because he wanted that, wanted Blair to feel that pain, for one minute; to feel blindsided, to feel how close things always were to falling apart.

Blair stood there with his hand still outstretched, his lips moving with unvoiced words he probably wasn't even aware of as his eyes locked onto Jim's. Then he let his hand drop and shoved both his hands into his coat pockets. "Jim?" he said out loud, and it was question and protest, and the expression on his face was the one that the most selfish, paranoid, terrified, and undeniably childish part of Jim had been aiming for.

Jim let the seconds — too many of them — stretch out before he added, "Not until we get home," and that, too, was courtesy of the S.O.B. he was deep inside, the S.O.B. who kept watch as the emotion on Blair's face shifted toward anger and who reveled in it.

Fast on the uptake, his partner; hadn't taken Sandburg long at all to figure out that he was being manipulated. And being manipulated always pissed Sandburg off and he'd be simmering with that during the five minutes it would take to drive to the loft, sitting beside Jim in the truck and simmering with anger, along with everything else. And when Jim slammed the door to the loft closed behind them and shoved Blair up against the living room wall — hands, mouth, hips pushing, giving no quarter — Blair would shove back just as hard, and it would be both of them pushing, giving no quarter. Both of them.

Gasoline? Napalm.

And necessary. Right now, necessary.

Sometimes the more you knew about yourself the less there was to like.

Sandburg's hands were back out of his pockets, clenching and unclenching slightly; probably to keep himself from grabbing a fistful of Jim's jacket and getting in his face right here on the sidewalk, giving the passersby a show. There was barely any breeze to speak of and the clouds of fog from each breath he released hung in the air near his face like smoke from a damp-wood fire, dispersing slowly.

Fire, again. No ice in Blair's anger. Heat, always, with Blair.

"You asshole," Blair said.

No argument there. But an unarmed, untrained, unwilling to use deadly force fucking _anthropology_ student taking off down an alley in pursuit of an armed and all too ready to kill third-strike felon, too far away from any chance for you to help…

Surest thing in the fucking universe, how fast things could go wrong. How permanently.

Blair was almost visibly vibrating with angry energy now, the adrenaline letdown of a few minutes ago completely overridden. His hands had started working the air in slightly broader motions made choppy by that anger and he was rocking a little on his heels; the small, jerky movements of a lit fuse. Somehow, the hair plastered wetly against his head showed the curve of his skull even more painfully than when he had his hair pulled back tightly, showed the shape of his forehead, showed and obscured the line of his neck, clinging to it in wet strands.

"I'm not some kind of wind-up toy for you to —"

"The truck," Jim interrupted. He jerked his head toward the corner and held Blair's glare for only an instant — but long enough — before he started walking again, toward Anstruther and the truck, and a fast and nasty detour to the loft before they headed in to the station.

Sandburg would follow him, furious or not. Second surest thing in the universe, and God alone knew why Blair did it, was that Blair would follow him. Especially when he shouldn't.

There were more pedestrians on the sidewalk now, near the overpriced yuppie shops on Anstruther, but it wasn't difficult to pick out the particular squeak of Sandburg's Nikes behind Jim's back from the sound of the other walkers' wet shoes meeting wet pavement, not even necessary to think about it in order to track Sandburg's breathing and heartbeat — or to tune out what he was muttering under his breath as he walked.  
.  
What _was_ necessary right now… Well, Sandburg had called him a throwback the second time they met — had pissed him the hell off by calling him a throwback, and you always take the most offense at the things that hit closest to home.

Get the most desperate about the things that hit closest to home.

 _Home._ Upstairs, inside the loft, six more minutes.

The two of them. 'Life-affirming', the shrinks would probably call it from their ivory towers. The shrinks were idiots. It wasn't affirmation — times like this, it wasn't ever affirmation — it was denial.

Christ, as if that ever worked, telling the fucking universe what it wasn't allowed to take away.

Home; Blair's strength pushing back against his, meeting it, matching it. Blair's necessary, so very goddamn necessary, strength. Jim turned the corner onto Anstruther — half a block from the truck, from heading home — Blair two steps behind him.

Following.

 

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**Prospect Avenue, 800 block**   


"Stay there," Blair snapped as he propped Jim against the side of the F-150.

Jim saluted him with a truly pathetic Gumby meets the Three Stooges attempt at military precision, nearly poking his eye out with his thumb, and said, "Yessir," with exaggerated care. But during the three seconds Blair had to partially let go of him in order to shut the passenger door, he lurched away from the truck anyway.

Lurched away and _down_ ; his arms were starting to windmill as he staggered, and the surface of the sidewalk was gaining on him fast. All Blair had time for was an off balance lunge and yank that succeeded in keeping Jim from realigning his nose on the cement only because it brought him down onto his butt instead.

Onto two butts.

Fucking _ow_. "Damn it, Jim," Blair said to the back of Jim's head. He should've just let Jim take his chances with his original trajectory; with the charmed luck of the nearly passing-out drunk, Jim probably wouldn't have ended up needing plastic surgery. But no, he'd had to take _care_ of Jim, like a moron, even though it should've been Jim's ass hitting the sidewalk instead of his — undeserving — ass hitting the sidewalk with all the force of Jim's weight on top of his own, and now he had a lapful of Jim when that wasn't even a remotely interesting concept and an ass that was throbbing in an entirely non-erotic way, an entirely you've cracked my fucking tailbone way, and fucking _ow_.

Jim was laughing. Chortling, to be exact, his head lolling back onto Blair's shoulder and his body shaking with actual fucking chortles. "Catch me," he said — and Blair hadn’t known that Jim could _giggle_ , shit — as he rubbed the back of his head against Blair's neck.

It was impossible to be satisfyingly and unequivocally pissed off at a giggling Jim Ellison, even if Blair'd really had the right to be unequivocally pissed off in the first place. Which he didn't. He sighed, and Jim patted his thigh with a clumsy hand. "You catch me," Jim said again. And now he sounded like a five-year-old who'd just accidentally flushed his favorite goldfish down the toilet when he'd only meant to give it roomier digs to swim around in.

Crap. "Yeah, I catch you." Blair rested his chin against the top of Jim's head. "I try, anyway, but man, you don't make it easy sometimes."

"N'body else."

Well, there certainly weren't any other candidates around at the moment to get Jim's currently morose ass safely upstairs, at any rate. Blair sighed again. And if Jim meant more than that… "Yeah," he said into Jim's hair. "I know. Why don't we get the two of us inside now, huh?" He shifted his legs beneath Jim's awkward weight and pushed at Jim until he got him sitting more or less upright and with his butt eased down onto the sidewalk between Blair's thighs. Step one. The remaining number of steps needed to get Jim inside was a little depressing to contemplate.

And now Jim was rubbing his hand up along Blair's thigh and shifting a little on his own behalf. Backwards, against Blair's groin. Suggestively.

Oh, perfect. Prospect was pretty deserted at one a.m. on a cold February night, but all they needed was for Jim to start humping something — the air, Blair's thigh — and for a car to drive by right now, or for one of their neighbors to hit the bricks; it wouldn't be the first time Mr. McAfee made an emergency late-night suppository run to the twenty-four-hour drugstore on Wilson, for one thing. He needed to get Jim inside before whatever thin veneer of cover they had left in the neighborhood totally turned into kindling.

Jim's fingers were squeezing Blair's thigh tightly now, and he was moving his hips more insistently. "Wan' you," he mumbled.

Just fucking perfect. "Yeah, like _that’s_ gonna happen tonight," Blair muttered as he pried Jim's fingers up. How the crap did it turn out that Jim — who'd spent the last four hours getting plastered in one of the roughest dives in Cascade without anybody around to watch out for him — didn't have so much as a hangnail, while Blair was going to be hobbling around with a sore ass and finger marks on his thigh for the next couple of days? And without any mitigating afterglow.

"No, _wan'_ you," Jim said again, his voice now too loud in the quiet street.

"Okay, then we gotta get up and go inside first, Jim," Blair said, attempting to sound convincingly reasonable. No point in trying to sound convincingly optimistic; barring a stray cherry-picker pulling up to the curb in the next couple of minutes to handily deposit Jim onto their balcony — preferably from enough height to let him bounce at least once when he landed — getting Jim inside the building and upstairs obviously wasn't going to be pretty.

Jim's hand wandered back onto Blair's thigh and squeezed it again like it was a piece of fruit and he planned to juice it with his fingers. "Ow. Will you stop that?" Blair said, smacking Jim's hand. "We have to go _inside_ , okay? We have to get up and go inside first." He'd probably just leave Jim lying on his back on the hardwood right inside the door if they actually made it all the way up to the loft, sure, but he'd at least stick a pillow beneath Jim's head and cover him with a blanket. Never let it be said that Blair Sandburg didn't have any compassion.

"Ge' up?" Jim asked, and answered himself with a hiccup and another, "Up." And rolled awkwardly away from his happy home between Blair's thighs, apparently making a stab at standing up, and JesusfuckingChrist _shit_ —

"God _damn_ it, Jim," Blair said between his teeth, when he could talk without screeching. A hundred and ninety pounds of James Joseph Ellison leaning on his goddamned elbow as he tried to get up had just probably ruined Blair for life, and Jim was sitting obliviously on the sidewalk beside Blair's curled up, broken shell of a body, staring vacantly at nothing. He hadn't even had the decency to stumble out into the street and maybe get hit by a passing car or garbage truck or anything. Not that any cars or garbage trucks were passing, thank God.

But they couldn't stay here like here like this all night, or somebody _would_ drive by. Just what they needed, some misguided Good Samaritan to decide he and Jim were mugging victims and call Emergency Services, or a patrol car to happen by and decide — and not misguidedly at all — that one of Cascade's finest was drunk and intermittently horny for a person of his own chromosomal makeup. Blair groaned as he gingerly tried to uncurl enough to sit back up. Inhale, exhale, breathe it out…fuck. Forget sitting up.

" 's wrong?” A frantic hand landed on his cheek. “Chief?" Jim's voice sounded frantic too, belatedly.

"Aside from you trying to castrate me with your elbow?" That was mostly a wheeze. And nobody could blame him, surely, if it'd been on the bitter side. Inhale, exhale. Fuck, fuck, fuck. "What about you going off alone to get drunk? And at _Moe's_ , Jim, the worst cop-hating bar in the entire —"

" 's _wrong_?" Jim's hand patted Blair's face even more frantically, and Blair found himself sighing for about the fiftieth time during the past forty fun-filled minutes of extracting Jim safely from the scary depths of Moe's, somehow pouring him into the truck, and listening to him attempt to sing 'Fortunate Son' in a tragically bad falsetto for most of the drive back to Prospect. Talking to Jim right now was a waste of oxygen, so why was he even bothering to try?

"Nothing," Blair said as soothingly as he could, trying not to wheeze this time. "Nothing's wrong, Jim. We're just going to stay here for a minute" — or three or four hours, God — "and then we're going to go inside and go to bed. Okay?" Inhale, exhale.

Jim was still kneeling unsteadily beside Blair, but he relaxed at the tone Blair had managed to get into his voice and his attention wandered back onto the empty street. Blair concentrated on breathing. Of course, what he really needed to concentrate on was getting the hell up and getting Jim inside… Crap — no, not quite ready for that yet.

He went back to systematic "Out with the pain, in with the relief" breathing. After another minute, Jim heaved a deep breath himself. "Blair? Blair, I'm drunk."

"No shit. A fact that's going to be brought home even more unmistakably to you tomorrow when you wake up feeling like total crap." Especially since Jim's chances of having Marco "I Drank the Whole Keg Myself" Miller's unfailing miracle hangover cure shared with him tomorrow morning had bottomed out right around the time his elbow had planted itself in Blair's crotch.

Okay, that was petty, sure, considering _why_ —

"Blair, why 'm I drunk?" Plaintive, now.

Fuck. "We'll talk about it tomorrow, Jim," Blair said. "Actually, I'll try to get you to talk about it and you'll try to pretend nothing happened at all and we'll both end up pissed off at each other, and I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that heartwarming scene." He shot Jim a glare, not that Jim was paying any attention. "This whole macho code shit of never let anybody see you hurting — this is the '90s, Jim, right? And it's not like… You don't need to… Oh, forget it." What was the point, anyway? Jim had sat back down on the sidewalk and was rubbing his chest idly with one hand and staring out into the street with absolutely no sign of sentience; no way would he track any of this tonight. Even when Blair repeated it all for his benefit tomorrow, he still probably wouldn't admit to tracking it, the dick. Under his breath Blair added, rhetorically, "Both of our lives would be a lot simpler if you would just _talk_ to me, you know."

"Gotta have rules, Chief," Jim said sadly, sounding more sentient than Blair would've given him credit for.

Rules. Jim's rules. _Don't shed in the shower, Sandburg_ — that rule Blair could live with, even if he lived with it mostly by flouting it. _God made headphones for a reason, Chief_ — another rule he could live with, at least when he was listening to something that really drove Jim crazy. _I'm shutting you out because I'm hurting_ , on the other hand, was utter crap as a rule. And he couldn't let it pass entirely unobjected to, even though Jim wasn't going to remember this conversation in the morning. "Jim, that's not really —"

"Suck it up, soldier."

 _Shit._ And when you can't suck it up, you drown in it. Blair closed his eyes for a moment. It wasn't fair. It really wasn't fair.

He nudged Jim's arm with his shoulder. "I'm sorry about your friend." Friend, Ranger buddy — brother in arms — maybe lover? Somebody Jim had cared about, anyway, one way or another. Life could be really fucking unfair to people who had hearts as big as Jim's and gave them away so goddamn completely.

And permanently. To someone they then — safe bet, since this was Jim — felt responsible for, even years later. Someone who was now dead, badly, messily. "Hey," Blair said. He uncurled his body a little more and wrapped his hand around Jim's arm. "It wasn't your fault. You get that, right?" A rational person would get that, but Jim wasn't always rational about responsibility. Or guilt. Blair tried again. "It wasn't your fault."

Jim's eyes were hooded by the shadows from the streetlight. "Yeah." He sounded a hell of a lot more sober, all of a sudden, even though he didn't sound particularly convinced. He cleared his throat. "Look, I know I should've… Blair, I know I shouldn't have…"

"It's okay." It wasn't. Jim hiding pain away and hurting on his own wasn't okay. It wouldn't ever be okay. Maybe he could convince Jim of that someday if he kept trying. But for right now, tonight… "It's okay," Blair repeated.

Jim leaned his head backwards a little, into the pool of yellow light from the streetlight, and closed his eyes. After a minute he said, "Chief, I'm the one who's drunk, right?"

"Yeah," Blair answered cautiously.

"So why are _you_ lying on the sidewalk?"

Shit, tomorrow was going to be interesting. "Lack of coordination," Blair said. It was the absolute truth, anyway. On more than one level.

He uncurled further and sat up all the way, groaning. Jim opened his eyes, looking like he'd lost his momentary flash of near-sobriety, and patted Blair's thigh. "Sidewalk's hard," he said, with apparent sympathy.

Sometimes everything was hard. Blair let his breath out slowly. "Yeah, it is. Why don't we finish going home now?" he said and forced himself to stand up despite heartfelt complaints from several key areas. "You are so going to owe me for this," he added under his breath as he started the thankless process of levering Jim to his feet. He wouldn’t be in any condition to collect anything really interesting until he was too old to enjoy it, probably, but Jim _owed_ him for all of this.

He got both of them more or less upright — if you didn't count Jim's face tucked down against Blair's neck and his legs having an unhelpful tendency to slide west, out toward the curb — without much enthusiasm for the process and with no assistance from Jim whatsoever. He was trying to talk his body into starting to walk both of them toward the lobby when Jim patted him on the chest.

“You,” Jim mumbled, against Blair’s throat.

No shit. At least Jim wasn't at the stage of confusing him with a lamppost or a pink elephant. Yet. "Yeah, Jim. Me."

" _You._ "

"Right. Me." Blair let his lips brush Jim's soft hair and cradled the back of Jim's head with the hand that wasn't hanging on to Jim's jacket for dear life, trying to keep him upright. "Me," he said again. "And you." Which was the important part, whether or not Jim knew it, drunk or sober. And he said it one more time before starting the struggle to get Jim's fried ass down the sidewalk to the lobby door, even though he didn't think Jim was listening. "Me and you, Jim. Time to go home."

 

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**West Napier Lane, 200 block**   


Jim looked at the people standing in line with them — most of them voluntarily, if the conversations he'd been eavesdropping on could be relied on — and scratched behind his ear. Thirty people standing on a sidewalk on an icy late winter night to hand over money so they could watch some over-intellectual moviemaker jack himself off for a hundred and thirty-five minutes. In Albanian.

"With subtitles," Sandburg had said, as if that was a selling point instead of a threat.

A stray gust of wind swirled down the street and Blair shivered, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. He was underdressed for the weather for once; old, worn-thin jeans and the unlined, beat-up — 'distressed', Blair called it, which sounded about right — black leather jacket he'd gotten from some surplus store. Jim raised an eyebrow meaningfully. Not that he didn't appreciate how well those jeans fit.

"Okay, don't say it; we should've stayed in the truck until they unlocked the doors." Sandburg left his hands in his pockets for that admission, but he didn't suggest going back to the truck and waiting till the theater opened, like any reasonable person would. Or going home before the doors opened and the movie started inflicting itself on the public, like anyone — reasonable or not — would if they believed in the Geneva Convention and basic human rights, and that certainly ought to include Jim's bleeding-heart partner.

But those jeans… No, they weren't going home now, even if Blair suddenly suffered an unlikely attack of consideration and offered Jim a pardon. Going home now would be an anticlimax.

In a manner of speaking.

"Not saying it also includes not smirking about it, Jim." Blair jabbed Jim's arm with his elbow, sounding exasperated. "But give this a chance, okay? It's supposed to be an outstanding film."

"Uh-huh. Worth getting frostbite for?" Jim asked, and fielded Sandburg's glare with another smirk. The pudgy twenty-something just ahead of them in line, who'd been trying to talk up the movie to his bored-looking companion for the last ten minutes with no visible success, said something that included the phrase "pseudo-phallic imagery deeply rooted in the ersatz collective unconscious" and Jim rolled his eyes. "Pseudo" was probably as close as the kid was going to get, if Jim was any judge of body language and of the evidence he was collecting from his senses. The girl just wasn't interested. Of course, if Porky was going to toss manure like that around he had to expect a brush-off from anyone who got a good whiff of it.

The wind had died down and Blair's hands were out of his pockets again, carving emphatically through the cold air and disturbing the fog of condensation from his breath as he started another round of misguidedly enthusiastic comments about _My Pretentious Movie_ , or whatever the name of this yawner was. Ahead of them, the clueless kid in the peacoat had optimistically put his arm around his bored date's waist. All the cues drifting back toward Jim said the kid was either beginning to get hot at the idea of spending a couple of hours with a bunch of subtitles, or he was anticipating something involving a hell of a lot fewer words that as far as Jim could read wasn't remotely in the cards. He could almost feel a little sorry for the poor pedantic schmuck in spite of his taste in movies.

Now _he_ , on the other hand, definitely had something in the cards, and it wasn't going to involve him reading a single subtitle. And Sandburg was going to do the anteing up, even if he didn't know it yet.

Jim had it all worked out. Stage One would be brief but key: finding them quiet, reasonably isolated seats, with no near neighbors in the crucial lines of sight. That shouldn't be too hard, providing the rest of Cascade retained its sanity and the thirty idiots currently waiting here with them were the only other inhabitants of the theater. Stage Two —

"— in Lithuania last year, but really it wasn't… _What_ , Jim?"

"Hmm? What?"

Blair was staring at him with suspicion. "What happened to Mr. 'You Can Guilt Me Into Coming Along But You Can't Make Me Like It'? All of a sudden you're smiling like you're actually looking forward to this — what's going on?"

"Not a thing, Chief. I agreed to come with you, right? So I might as well try to relax and enjoy it."

Blair narrowed his eyes. "That would be the open-minded and mature thing to do, yeah."

"You're implying that I can't be open-minded and mature?" Jim gave Blair a reproachful look. "I'm hurt."

Sandburg snorted skeptically and Jim raised his hands in defense. "Nothing on TV tonight anyway, remember? And I got porterhouse and cheesecake at Brannigan's without your usual snide commentary on my dietary habits. Pretty fair bribery there. And," he looked pointedly at Blair, "I'm getting double-buttered popcorn and a jumbo box of Raisinets to further ease the pain of my martyrdom, and you don't say a single word. That was the deal."

The face Sandburg made at that expressed his opinion perfectly well without words, and Jim grinned. He didn't really care that much about the Raisinets, one way or the other, but the popcorn…

Still grimacing, Blair shivered theatrically and shoved his hands back into his jacket pockets. "What time is it, anyway? We've been standing out here forever."

Jim resisted the temptation to remind Blair whose fault that was and checked his watch. "9:03." He listened for a minute to pick up any conversations going on inside the lobby and added, "Sounds like they're not in any hurry. Somebody was running late and they don't want to open up until they get the concession stand ready to go."

"Great," Blair muttered, leaving it up for grabs whether he was referring to the delay or to the impending readiness of the concession stand. He shivered again, then — relentlessly — shifted his focus back to Albania. "Hey, I know you're not thrilled here, but it's going to be great, Jim. Trust me. I mean, with Dedja using the philosophy of perception as a metaphor for societal structure, and the way his other films have pushed the envelope and how this one is supposed to be —"

His hands were out of his pockets and moving animatedly through the air again. Ahead of them, the luckless geek in the peacoat whispered a fairly straightforward suggestion into his date's unreceptive ear and didn't seem to notice that she was about as interested as a cube of ice in the idea.

 _Jim's_ Stage Two was going to be a lot more effective than anything Dick Dense up there tried on with Bored Betty.

Oh, yeah. If Sandburg got anywhere near as absorbed in this movie as he did with the standard snooze fare on the Discovery Channel, Stage Two was going to be a walk in the park.

"— incorporates Kuhn's arguments against the positivist view when interpreting empirical data in his —"

Jim let his gaze drop and linger on the intimately familiar contours of Blair's thighs. Stage Two… He'd start Stage Two — after he'd had enough popcorn — by giving a friendly pat to Sandburg's thigh. Would keep his hand there, absentmindedly. For that, if Blair wasn't too caught up yet in Whozit's directorial genius, Jim would probably get a quick smile.

He'd just let his hand rest there on Blair's thigh for a little while, enjoy the solid feel of the muscle beneath his fingers, let his sense of touch filter through the helpfully thin, soft denim of Blair's jeans to reach the texture of skin and hair.

Passive, unmoving. Completely innocuous.

At first...until he was sure Blair was fully absorbed in the garbage on the screen, and he could venture more deeply into Stage Two. Which would be the stealthy slide of his hand toward the inside of Blair's thigh; if he did it slowly enough, Sandburg wouldn't notice. Not for a good long while.

"— spent a year in Afghanistan, working with a local —"

It was like shooting fish in a barrel when Sandburg was concentrating on something, to get his body to pay attention well before his mind paid attention; to set off a series of tiny tremors in his muscles, get his pulse elevated and his hormones kicking in, his cock starting to fill out and darken, his body primed to go, while his mind was still fully engaged on some three-inch thick textbook or somebody's interminable video footage of some expedition to nowhere appealing, or a stack of fucking blue books.

Under the right circumstances, Sandburg didn't do split attention worth crap.

"— tangentially relates to Rostrovic's study about exteroception and Jungian archetypes, according to Malvern's review, but I'm not sure I'm buying that. Still, you have to look at it from various angles; I mean —"

Here, tonight, he'd keep it low-key. Play — relatively — nice. Just that covert move inward and upward, until his palm was resting easy and light, almost not there, at Blair's fly. Let his fingers begin to do a little careful ghosting, start to get Sandburg's dick involved without interrupting Blair's single-minded focus on Albania's self-proclaimed gift to the cinematic art form.

"— contrasts the two major realist theories of perception, which should be interesting. But the totally cool thing here is how all this ties in with the psychological profiles of people who have a measurable level of heightened perception with at least one of their senses — which you have to admit is pretty topical, right? — and I'm really looking forward to seeing how Dedja —"

And he'd get to listen to Sandburg's pulse start to speed up and to him unconsciously trying to control his breathing, instead of the arty Albanian dialog coming from the speakers; he'd get to watch Blair's face begin to flush, instead of looking at —

Exteroception? Jungian archetypes? Psychological profiles of people with heightened… _Christ._

He deserved this.

And he wasn't going to rush it. Slow and steady, and all the while, the buttery, salty traces of the popcorn he'd have eaten would be transferring from his hand, through that idiotically thin denim and the even thinner cotton of Blair's boxers onto Blair's skin, so that by the time he got Blair home — early, he'd be willing to bet; Blair with his face flushed from what Jim had started, running his tongue over his bottom lip…or biting his lip and glaring, but what the hell — the fine skin of Blair's dick, the sweet skin on the inside of his thighs, would taste like a good Bruce Willis movie.

"— on a number of levels, right? You know, you might actually enjoy this, Jim, if you just give it a chance."

Blair and movie-theatre popcorn, double-buttered. "Tell you what, Chief," Jim said, watching through the plate glass of the theater doors as a skinny kid headed across the lobby toward the doors carrying a bunch of keys, "I'll give it my best shot."

 

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**401 Mercy Boulevard; Greene Avenue, 300 block; Mercy Lane**   


"Go home," Jim had said.

Right. Sure. Absolutely. After all, Jim was on his way up to the room they'd — finally — found for him and visiting hours were long over. And it was the middle of the night anyway, when the theory was that a fair percentage of the population was supposed to want to be at home, in bed, even if whoever was supposed to be in bed _with_ them wasn't there.

The coffee Blair'd gotten from a vending machine on his way out was trembling a little in his hand, and the reflections from the hospital's outside lights swirled across the dark surface. Temperamental coffee, apparently, as well as cheap.

And trembling harder. Crap.

The ER doors shushed open behind Blair's back and he tightened his grip on the Styrofoam cup and sucked in a deep breath, letting it out slowly as a man and a woman walked past him, the woman holding a little girl in her arms and murmuring to her quietly. _Calm._ Calm was good. He was calm. The coffee was calm. Everything was calm. Everything was okay.

Jim was okay. Everything was okay.

Blair took in another deep breath, concentrating on technique as he pulled the air into his diaphragm and held it before letting it out. The coffee was riding evenly in its cup again, and he'd drink it, no matter how excitable — or gutless — it was, and then he would…what?

Go home, like Jim had said? Go back to campus, to his office; get some work done, since he wasn't going to be sleeping wherever he was, even without any help from his highly strung coffee?

Yeah, sure, like he really wanted to go back to his office, where he'd been sitting with his thumb up his ass this afternoon while Jim was going after Blaine.

Alone, dammit.

Wet heat sloshed onto his fingers unexpectedly and Blair scowled at the cup in his hand. There was a trashcan a yard away next to the curb and he dumped the hyperactive coffee into it and wiped his hand off on his jeans. If Jim wanted to bitch about coffee stains and whose turn it was to do the laundry this week, fine; it was his fault in the first place that Blair had wasted fifty cents on coffee that wouldn't even stay cooperatively inside its cup.

It was Jim's fault, going after Blaine alone.

 _Alone._ Like an idiot, a clobbered-in-the-head, unconscious idiot who was lucky he hadn't been turned into a clobbered-in-the-head _dead_ idiot.

Very lucky — just a minor concussion, the doctor had said, and they were only keeping him overnight to make sure his head was as hard as every scrap of experiential evidence had always pointed to. Blair rubbed his hand on his jeans again distractedly. At least the coffee hadn't been hot enough to burn his fingers. Lukewarm, jumpy, wimpy, and undoubtedly about as far from Fair Trade as coffee could get; he was so going to hit Jim and his minor concussion up for that fifty cents later.

 _Go home_ , Jim had said. Jim would be upstairs in his room by now, still crabbier than shit and probably annoying the crap out of the fourth-floor nurses. And the Corvair was just across the street, looking lonely now that all the cars that'd been parked around it this afternoon were gone. So he maybe _should_ go home.

Or he could go somewhere and get a better cup of coffee. He could hit Jim up for that later, too. Or he could stand here and stare at the mostly empty parking lot — clearly a slow night at St. Elizabeth's ER — until he went crazy.

Or…he could go for a walk. Yeah, a walk might be good. It wasn't actually raining, just misting enough to leave golden haloes around the streetlights, and warmer than March nights usually were. And it was peaceful for a hospital and its surroundings, much quieter than Cascade General or Northside would be even at this hour. The sidewalk in front of him was invitingly deserted; he could just walk around the block a time or two and stretch his legs. Walk around the hospital, actually, since the building took up the whole block, and —

Hang out in Jim's current neighborhood a little while longer. Shit.

How lame could he get? He might as well go back inside and sneak upstairs to spend the rest of the night camped out in Jim's room, which would please Jim and the nursing staff just about equally.

But he started down the sidewalk anyway, and it did feel good to walk. He probably had more in common than he wanted to admit with his late and unlamented cup of coffee, kinetically speaking, and being cooped up in Jim's world's tiniest ER cubicle for hours hadn't helped — too much energy needing an outlet, and not enough room in that stupid cubicle to allow pacing. Not that he hadn't tried. He just hadn't succeeded, thanks to Jim, since watching him try to pace had — supposedly— made Jim's headache worse.

He hadn't minded too much, though. If he wasn't pacing he could sit on the edge of Jim's gurney — Jim's really ridiculously narrow gurney — and there'd been a major up side to that, since the real estate was so limited his ass had absolutely no choice except to brush up against Jim's leg, in the kind of apparently casual contact that probably wouldn't register on the gossip meter with any of the hospital staff who kept coming in unannounced to check on Jim and his minor concussion.

Jim hadn't helped with the gurney-sitting any more than he had with the pacing, of course. Okay, Blair's leg had kept jiggling without his permission, and it was entirely plausible that jiggling the gurney hadn't done much to ease Jim's headache. But sitting on the lone chair in the room hadn't worked either, since he kept discovering — or having it pointed out to him by Jim, with very little patience — that he had his hands on Jim somewhere: hanging out on Jim's hip or chest or holding onto Jim's arm like Jim was planning on vaulting off the gurney and heading out after Blaine again in his hospital gown. Eventually Blair had had to shove the chair as far away from the bed as he could. That hadn't been very far, considering the size of the room, but it'd been far enough. Too far.

And yeah, he got why it would be seriously not good for a nurse to bustle in while his fingers were absentmindedly tracing Jim's abs through the thin cotton of the hospital gown, not with the way hospitals and cops, as their frequent customers, were in bed together, rumor-mill-wise.

Which did nothing to explain why Jim had kissed him. The idiot — no doors on Jim's cubicle and people coming in every few minutes? Man, they'd been lucky nobody had walked in on that.

It had to have been the crappiest kiss ever, anyway, if you didn't count puberty. Zero technique, no coordination, too hurried —

But he had to admit it'd been one of Jim's better ideas in spite of being a stupid risk to take, because the doctor had just said those magic words, that Jim was okay, no big deal — and after that somebody had stuffed cotton into Blair's ears and he'd heard the doctor's parting comments only vaguely. Or maybe it'd been seashells instead of cotton, since he could hear surf roaring somewhere in the distance, but he hadn't heard much else until he heard Jim's voice saying, "Get over here." And he hadn't noticed much else, either, like whether the floor was still holding up somewhere below his feet, until Jim had grabbed his arm and yanked him down into that kiss.

A crappy, awkward, stupidly risky kiss, and about the best kiss Blair could remember.

The peaceful night air around him was starting to get colder. That figured — he was almost halfway around the hospital now, the equivalent of two blocks away from the Corvair's semi-trusty heater whether he turned around or kept walking. He picked up his pace a little as he turned the next corner — okay, the night wasn't quite as peaceful on this side of St. Elizabeth's; some kind of heating unit or generator or something was putting out a lot of noise. The view wasn't as nice either: no more spot-lit landscaping, just a row of enormous locked dumpsters and some empty loading docks.

It was still fairly well lit, though — and deserted, and Jim would probably be even crabbier than he'd been earlier if he knew Blair was walking around back here, even though muggers with any remote grasp of the science of probabilities would be hanging around the front of the hospital instead, where there was more likely to be actual foot traffic with its associated wallets and purses. Not that that little bit of common sense would register with Jim. Trust a cop to look on the dark side, to look at everything like it was a crime statistic waiting to happen.

A crime statistic waiting to happen? Jim had taken a shot at that this afternoon all by himself. And succeeded, almost too well.

 _Officer down_ … Only there'd been nobody but Jim to call that in and Jim hadn't been in any condition to call it in.

Just lying there, unconscious. Vulnerable; anything could've happened. Anything.

 _Anything._

God, it could've been so bad. So far beyond bad. So far beyond — and Jim wouldn't be — Jim would be — and what if next time, next time —

And shit, there weren't any bus-stop benches on this ass-side of the hospital, no little shrubbery-planted areas with cast-iron chairs and fountains and encouraging statuary — and he thought he'd already dealt with this, hadn't he dealt with this already?

Apparently fucking not. Blair bent to brace his hands on his thighs, trying to breathe and somehow keep his suddenly racing heart from pounding its way out of his ribcage, but stumbled instead and nearly fell. Great, that was just the icing on the — wait, his hand was brushing something; the side of the building? Okay, that could work; a wall to lean against, you could always lean against a wall, right? and if that didn't work he could always sit down, like fall the fuck down, but he could try leaning first. More dignified. More in control.

So okay. Lean. Take it easy. Just breathe, ride this out. It wouldn't last long. Just ride it out.

Take it easy, yeah. Just stop thinking about what could've happened. About Jim taking chances, whether he had backup or not.

About Jim always taking chances.

About Jim leaving him because he took stupid chances — and why the fuck hadn't he gone with Jim today anyway, why hadn't he skipped that pointless meeting, skipped his unnecessary office hours and been there to back Jim up? Yeah, he wanted his doctorate, wanted some of what Rainier could offer, but did he want it more than he wanted Jim? No, _no_ , how could he, so why hadn't he —

 _Breathe, dammit._ Stop thinking and breathe. Physical focus, that was it; focus on the physical world, here and now. Focus on breathing. On the sidewalk beneath his feet. On the wall behind his back; rough brick, holding him up. Solid. Unmoving. Steady.

And a fucking _wall_. The second time he'd ever seen Jim, Jim had shoved him against a wall. And it hadn't been the last time for that, not even close. Walls, with Jim, weren't about being steady and unmoving, supporting, about lessening panic; they were about not being entirely in control.

For one reason or another.

Blair balled his fist and slammed it backwards against the wall, this Wall For One, this unmoving, indifferent, totally not-out-of-control wall.

 _Go home_ , Jim had said. He'd also said, "Not your fault, Chief." And "Don't be an ass, Sandburg. I can take care of myself."

And "Get over here", before an unwise and crappy kiss that still managed to slow Blair's heart down from beating too fast for the wrong reasons even while it fucked with speeding it up for the right reasons.

But Jim wasn't ever going to say, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't chase after this guy on the FBI's most wanted list, at least not into this dark alley without any backup; or jump off this overpass onto the top of that moving bus; or rappel off the top of this ninety-fucking-story building and play human wrecking-ball through a plate-glass window to try to get a jump on this sociopathically inclined creep who likes to play with bombs, because man, it would kill Blair if something happened to me." Jim wasn't ever going to say that.

And he couldn't ever ask Jim to. Blair slammed his fist against the wall again, helplessly.

 _Control._ He sure as hell wasn't in control.

Maybe Jim had a point about walls.

 

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**Prospect Avenue between Clancy and Denham**   


Drive out to Esperanza Point? Jim fingered the keys in his pocket, looking at the lighted windows of the loft two blocks away and at the F-150 parked just beyond the lobby door. Yeah, why not? He'd always liked the beach at night. And even though the walk to Keller's and the two slowly nursed beers had taken the sharp edge off his own anger, Sandburg was obviously still primed for an explosion; his back was currently turned to the window, but his body language was clear.

Seething.

Christ, what a stupid fight.

Blair moved out of Jim's line of sight and Jim edged up his hearing: refrigerator door opening, shutting a moment later; the creak and snap of a plastic bottle cap being twisted off; the sound of Blair drinking, two long swallows; the slosh of liquid and the muted thud as the bottle was put down somewhere with a little too much force.

Footsteps, and then Sandburg was back in the living room, crossing it to stand in front of the windows. The set of the skin around his eyes said 'headache', which served him right.

And made Jim want to force-feed him aspirin. Stubborn —

"Son of a bitch." Blair slapped his palm against the glass of the balcony door. "Three goddamn a.m., Jim. Get your ass back here." The words blurred the windowpane with fog that vanished much more slowly than the echo of his voice in Jim's ears. His hand was still on the glass, leaving a hand-print; oils that would stay there until Jim cleaned the smudge off. Sandburg wouldn't clean it off himself, that was a given. Even if he noticed it.

And it was two thirty-five according to Jim's watch. Blair exaggerated with as little conscience as he skated around the edge of truth when it suited his purpose. As he pushed.

Like he'd pushed tonight.

Still, it'd been a stupid fight. One bad mood — Jim's — and Blair's unwillingness to give him a little space. That was it, and it wouldn't have been more than a few loud minutes' worth of getting in each other's faces and blowing off a little steam, if both of them hadn't been already frayed from a long, rough week. Any other night, it wouldn't have been more than five minutes before one of them would've stopped yelling and come back to his senses, and then both of them would've stopped yelling, and then they would've been having the kind of makeup sex that would've gone a long way toward making up for everything that had gone so wrong on the job all fucking week.

"Fuck this," Blair said against the window, "I'm going to bed." He pushed off from the glass and turned away, crossed to the lamp and clicked it off and started up the stairs, the angry line of his back still visible in the silver light from the nearly full moon.

Bed. They wouldn't have made it to bed for the first round. He would've had Blair against the door, or Blair would've crowded him against the table, pressed him down onto it, pressed into Jim or pressed himself onto Jim, ridden him. Going deep, both of them, holding nothing back. Getting what they both needed after this fucking week.

He could hear Sandburg yanking the dresser drawer open, pulling clothes off and on. Cool weather, no sex imminent — he'd be putting on an old T-shirt and his ancient baggy sweatpants, the fleece-lined pair; grime-gray, with sagging elastic in the waistband and a mildew-green, laundry-chewed stripe of paint on the front of the left thigh, riding close to his balls.

After a rustle of fabric as the sheets were pulled back, the mattress creaked briefly and went silent. Which meant Blair had gotten into bed and was lying there without moving, instead of wriggling around like a surfaced earthworm trying to get safely back underground the way he usually did when he got into bed, twisting the sheets and himself around Jim until he and Jim were both practically immobilized.

No wriggling around tonight. And Sandburg had started muttering to himself, in some probably obscure language that was all harsh consonants. The last time they'd had a fight that had lasted long enough for Blair to stomp up to bed alone he'd recited similar-sounding imprecations under his breath until he'd fallen asleep. He hadn't moved that night either after he'd gotten into bed, and the missing rustle of the sheets had felt as angry to Jim as the sound of his muttering voice.

He'd moved at some point, though, later on. When Jim had finally decided that sleeping on his own mattress was his God-given right and that if anyone was going to brood on the couch until dawn it ought to be Sandburg instead of him, he'd gone upstairs to find Blair asleep on Jim's side of the bed, which wasn't the side of the bed Jim had heard him lie down on, hours before.

His forehead had been faintly creased with the particular line that only showed up when he was worried, and his hand had been curved on the mattress in front of his chest like he was trying to wrap it around Jim's arm. His T-shirt had ridden up, and the slow rise and fall of his breathing was being mapped directly by skin instead of fabric; mapped by muscle, bone, and skin, and Jim had climbed into bed behind him and fitted himself silently against Blair's back, against the breathing he needed to see and hear and feel…

 _Needed to._

Needed to, wanted to.

So much for driving out to Esperanza Point. Cooling off at Keller's had been enough; enough distance, enough time away.

More than enough.

The undoubtedly unflattering comments coming from the loft faded into silence as Jim crossed the corner at Calhoun and onto their block, then the mattress creaked beneath a slow, sliding rustle of fabric against fabric. Sandburg's heart rate was down and he was breathing more deeply, falling asleep fast despite his anger. Not surprising; his reserves had to be shot to hell from dealing with the Karras case vics and the fiasco with Lopez, not to mention the messy domestic disturbance Jim had ended up responding to on the way home the night before last when all the patrol units in the vicinity had been tied up elsewhere. Fucking week.

Jim paused beside Colette's plate-glass window and drew in a deep breath. Fucking week that was _over_. Now.

Because now he would go upstairs and climb into bed — Blair's side of the bed, if that rustle of fabric had been Blair moving over to Jim's side — and fit himself against Blair's back. And Blair would murmur "Jim", sleepily, and with relief in his voice. And before Blair could wake up enough to remember that they'd been fighting, Jim would have one hand inside those loose sweatpants, knuckles brushing against the lumpy worn fleece as his palm smoothed the warm line of Blair's hip; would have the other hand underneath the T-shirt and against Blair's ribcage, riding the reassuring rhythm of Blair's breathing; would have his lips against the honey-scented skin at the nape of Blair's neck.

Would have everything he needed.

They would both have everything they needed. He was going to make sure of that. Going to make up for this fucking week, for both of them. Right now.

 

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**Montgomery Street, 100 block**   


Blair aimed an admiring smile at the Playmate-caliber blonde as she walked past his table, whistling silently in appreciation when the rear view turned out to be just as Miss April-worthy as the front view. Suddenly the temperature felt more like summer than spring, and he pushed up the sleeves of his heavy turtleneck and wished he'd gone with handily removable layers this morning. Not that he'd had time to put on three shirts; he'd barely had time as it was to pull on the first thing he could grab out of the dresser drawer before he'd had to barrel out the door. Eight a.m. classes were a bitch.

But if he blew off Dr. Huston's seminar tomorrow morning he could spend all day with Jim. That thought — both thoughts — made him smile, and he resumed drumming his fingers on the aluminum grillwork of the table top and resolutely ignoring the cup of coffee sitting in front of him as he watched the courthouse doors across the street.

There was Jim coming out now, scanning the street for the Corvair, naturally, not checking out the row of tables on the sidewalk outside Just's Coffee. Blair gave a quick glance around, and since no one at the other tables or passing on the sidewalk seemed to be paying any attention to him, he said quietly, "Jim. Over here at Just's." Jim's head pivoted toward the coffee shop and Blair felt the little flare of exhilaration he felt every time — or at least every time Jim wasn't being a major dick about using his senses — that he got to watch Jim do what only Jim could do.

Okay, he was feeling a little flare of something else, too, as Jim walked smoothly down the courthouse steps in an expensive-looking dark gray suit Blair hadn't ever seen him wear before. Jim looked…smooth. Looked good.

Shit, _great_.

How was it that you could put maybe a thousand guys in suits and get 'boring' or 'no way', a cross between Richard Nixon and Ward Cleaver, but Jim could look the way he did? Effortlessly, apparently. Like he was born to be a suit's idea of its model wearer.

Blair shifted from drumming his fingers on the table to drumming his fingers on the side of the coffee cup as Jim threaded his way across the street through the gaps in traffic, moving out of the shadow of the courthouse and into the late afternoon sunlight where he looked even more like…well, like he wouldn't have gotten out of the loft looking like that this morning with his virtue intact if he'd put that suit on before Blair'd had to leave for class. Screw being late.

Maybe he could talk Jim into wearing a suit more often? This suit, not the dark blue suit he usually wore to court with a light blue shirt or a pinstriped Oxford; he looked good in that suit too, sure, really good — but man, _this_ suit…

Jim held up a hand in what had to be an insincere apology to a speeding driver who'd just been forced to slow down to avoid creaming him, and the sun glinted off something silver at his wrist.

Cufflinks.

Right.

Cufflinks, this suit, the classy tie, and that killer white shirt; the kind of shirt that if Blair put on, he'd look like a — well, he wouldn't look like Jim did.

Which, at the moment, included looking annoyed. Great. He should've expected that Jim would be annoyed after having to spend the whole day in court. Cops and courts — not much warm and fuzzy there, at least on the cop side of the equation. It would make an interesting adjunct paper for the Thin Blue Line dissertation he wasn't writing: how cops perceived and interacted with the legal system which administered the law they were sworn to uphold. Based on everything he'd observed so far from Jim and the rest of MCU and the department as a whole, you had to wonder why it was postal workers who had the rep for getting fed up and going nuts, not cops. Not that that wasn't a good thing, relatively speaking. If you had to have somebody going postal, you did _not_ want it to be a SWAT guy in full body armor, carrying specialized uber-weaponry and a lot more boned up on the PD's likeliest cutting-edge containment tactics than your average stamp-slinger.

Jim made it across the street in one piece, managing to irritate at least two other drivers on the way but avoiding actual body-to-car contact, and headed for the curb between a classy 1963 Falcon Futura and a Jetta that was obviously unloved. He looked as annoyed close up as he had farther away. Big time post-court grouch, no question. But that didn't have to mean defeat. Never say die, right? Derail, disarm, achieve the objective.

And forget the suit. For the moment, anyway.

Blair suppressed a sigh. _Focus._ Right. "Hey," he said to his approaching partner, ignoring Jim's frown. "How'd it go?"

"You were supposed to be waiting out front to pick me up, not…this." Jim waved a dismissive hand at the row of tables on the sidewalk outside Just's. "Get your coffee and come on; I'm not in the mood for —"

"Whoa," Blair broke in, "just sit down for a minute, okay? What happened with Farley? Has it gone to the jury yet?"

Jim's frown deepened. "I've been sitting the whole damn day." But he sat down anyway, then sighed. "No. Farley's lawyer is doing a bang-up job of complicating things, otherwise I would've been out of there by noon. At least I'm done now."

Disarm, derail, appease. "That's good," Blair said agreeably. "Back to tracking down witnesses on Mielke tomorrow, right? I can blow off my morning seminar. I've been looking for an excuse to do that, anyway — I think Dr. Huston's still a little ticked off at me about a couple of points I brought up at his last lecture and if I go I'll probably just end up ticking him off even further, which might not be the best idea at the moment since he already thinks I'm a delusional zealot. Which," he eyed Jim warningly, "you don't need to remind me is an opinion that you frequently have yourself." Had Jim's lips just quirked…? No. Crap. But Blair still had the one-two punch of bribery and Jim's about-to-surface pity to call on. He drummed his fingers against the coffee cup again and smiled helpfully at Jim. "So I can come with you tomorrow if you want."

Jim ran a hand over the back of his head. "Fine." He jerked his head at the coffee cup sitting virginally in front of Blair with its plastic lid still tightly closed. "Drink your damn coffee so we can go, all right?"

Show time. This was going to work. "Oh, hey," Blair said, sliding the cup across the table toward Jim, "this is actually for you. Sumatran, straight. Thought you might want something to get the taste of courthouse vending-machine coffee out of your mouth."

"Let me guess," Jim said dryly, making no move to pick up the coffee. "You only had enough money to buy one cup of coffee — make that you only had enough money to buy one _plain_ cup of coffee, not any of the fancy shit — and you figured I'd be a nice guy and spring for some of the overpriced garbage with the idiotic gussied-up foam since you got me this." He raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He didn't look sympathetic at all. Or bribed.

Damn. "You have a regrettably suspicious nature, Jim. Would I do that?" Blair threw his best innocent look at Jim and watched it bounce off those cynically raised eyebrows without making any impression. Okay, retrench. Jim knew him way too well sometimes. "Yeah, yeah; don't answer that." Waving his earlier question off, he grinned at Jim and changed gears to aim for charmingly sheepish instead of innocent. "Did it work?"

"No," Jim said. But there was a hint of a crinkle at the corner of his eyes. He uncrossed his arms and reached for the coffee. "Thanks, though," he added, clearly enjoying the irony of the situation, the prick, as he pulled the lid off the cup and steam rose into the air along with the unfettered aroma of truly excellent coffee.

Blair tugged his bottom lip between his teeth. "You sure it didn't work?"

"Yep." Jim took a sip of the coffee with ostentatious pleasure and Blair glared at him.

Another sip, and no sign of weakening on Jim's part. Blair glared harder. "You have no heart."

"Nope." Jim was grinning now, the jerk. Blair added a pout to his glare and Jim's grin broadened. He cocked an eyebrow at Blair. "You want coffee, there's always the barter economy."

Oh, yeah. _Houston, we have liftoff._ So what, if pouting was a little obvious? It almost always worked; on Jim, anyway. Or at least enough for Blair to get one foot through the door, and bartering was definitely a foot through Just's door.

And since Jim had opened that door… Blair smiled at Jim with all the fake ingenuousness at his disposal and said, "Great idea. Economics as if people mattered; very E. F. Schumacher, very socio-politically correct, very hip. So, you think I should ask around, see who wants to do some trading?" He tilted his head slightly toward the next table and its two attractively put together female occupants and lowered his voice. "Maybe one of them? Or both; hey, I could end up with enough of Just's finest to keep me caffeinated for —"

"Ten minutes?" Jim said. He put his coffee cup down on the table and rubbed his chin skeptically, as if even that much would be beyond Blair's reach.

Blair narrowed his eyes. "I was thinking more like a couple of weeks."

The plastered-on skepticism gave way to equally plastered-on compassion. "I seem to recall you referring to yourself as 'delusional' earlier…"

"Very funny, Jim. You know, you just might end up regretting that clearly envy-engendered slur on my —" Blair stopped abruptly. A tall skinny guy fresh from Just's doorway was walking past their table with a blissed-out look on his face as he sipped from his cup and licked foam from his upper lip. The cup had Just's locally famous big green star stamped on the side; one of the cups the coffee shop used only for their special lattes. Blair tore his eyes from the sight and tossed in the towel. "Okay, okay. Name your price."

Jim smiled lazily. "Oh, I will. Later." Then he stood and walked around the table, pausing beside Blair's chair. "And I'm going to enjoy collecting it."

"Kinda hoping we'll both enjoy it," Blair said under his breath. He let his eyes detour from Jim's bland too-bad-we're-in-public expression down to his white-shirted, enticing chest. Just's best and Jim; talk about win-win. "Make it a venti, man, and you can collect twice. Three times, if you throw in some biscotti."

"Don't think I won't be counting," Jim answered. His hand brushed Blair's shoulder as he turned away toward the door of the shop, and Blair sucked in a slightly deeper breath than he'd intended to. Six months into this — shit, almost a year, if you went back to the day they met — and one touch from Jim, even through the thick cable knit of the sweater Blair was wearing, could still make him feel like he'd just accidentally stuck a fork into a poorly wired toaster. Okay, not exactly true. Trying to dig a jammed whole-wheat bagel out of the Toastmaster with one of Carolyn's left-behind, hideously ornate Oneida forks tended to have a far less salubrious effect on his personal equipment than any touch from Jim did — there was electricity and there was _electricity_ , and Cascade Pacific Power had nothing on Jim Ellison where voltage was concerned.

Jim didn't look around as he walked away, although Blair would've bet the entire contents of…well, Jim's wallet, since his own was temporarily down to a buck fifty-seven, that he'd noticed Blair's reaction. "Hey," he said to Jim's back, "you know what I want, right? — an El Nino latte with double vanilla?"

"I know exactly what you want," Jim said without turning. Blair would've bet a chunk of Jim's money again that Jim's face was still bland, saying that. Although maybe not quite as bland when he added, "And since you're about to have your own coffee, if you want to call that doctored-up, foam-covered crap 'coffee', get your hands off mine."

Busted. Blair grimaced as he put Jim's cup down. Then he picked it up again after Jim had disappeared into the doorway and took a fast sip anyway. Jim would know he'd done it, sure — taste, smell, touch — but it wasn't like Blair was drinking the whole cup or anything, just one small sip to tide him over until his own coffee arrived; Jim would hardly miss one small —

Hey.

 _Jim would know he'd done it._ That could be a good thing, a good thing that Blair could make into an even better thing. Especially since Jim was wearing that suit…

He picked up Jim's cup again. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to him at all, which was helpful, and he dragged his lower lip and tongue along the top of the cup as he turned the cup in his hands, making sure he licked the entire rim, inside and out, discreetly. And thoroughly.

Oh, yeah; definitely a better thing.

He put the cup back down on Jim's side of the table when he'd finished, grinning to himself. Now every mouthful of Jim's coffee was going to taste like a preview of one or two of the things he planned to do to Jim later, or at least he hoped it would. After all, he was going to be sitting here drinking his — totally outstanding — coffee with Jim's two-second touch still zinging up and down his nerve endings and having to look at Jim in that suit, so Jim deserved a little extra to deal with on his side of the table. It was only fair.

Well, maybe it wasn't _entirely_ fair, but tonguing Jim's cup as a teaser for —

A tall green-starred Styrofoam cup and a white paper bag landed on the metal grille of the table next to Blair's elbow, and he nearly jumped.

"Guilty conscience?" Jim asked in a passable imitation of his interrogating-scum voice as he sat down again across from Blair. He looked at his coffee cup pointedly, and Blair gave him a carefully innocent shrug and concentrated on turning his attention to his newly acquired El Nino. He was aware of Jim watching him as he pulled the lid off and inhaled the aroma, but his small moan of delight was only partly intended for effect. Just's was legendary for the way they respected the noble bean, especially in its more elaborate incarnations; in their case latte art wasn't just the star so carefully etched into his El Nino's microfoam, it was the Louvre-worthy perfect balance and execution of the latte itself. Or to put it another way, it was like receiving expert oral sex from a Styrofoam cup, in public.

The first sip of the El Nino was all that it should've been and another moan slipped out, this one completely involuntary, and for a moment he forgot everything but the coffee. Or he did until he looked up from his abstractedly reverent gaze at the latte's maligned foam and into Jim's eyes, which were appreciably hotter than the 180 degrees of a fresh from the barista's hands cup of Just's.

 _God._ Jim was sitting there across the table with the white cuffs of his shirt even and perfect at the edges of his jacket sleeves, sunlight glinting off the silver cufflinks, holding his drooled-on coffee cup with both hands. Cradling it almost. Watching him with those scorching eyes.

"You seem to have something on your mind, Chief," Jim said after a moment. His voice was still mostly smooth, but a little roughness seemed to be sneaking in around the sides of it, and Blair found himself swallowing hard without having taken another drink of his latte.

Something on his mind?

Yeah. Holy crap, yeah. Suddenly, he _so_ had something on his mind. Something specific. Something they couldn't do, he and Jim couldn't risk.

But if they could…oh, man. If only they could stop there on the way home, if only he and Jim could —

No, wait. If Jim could already _be_ there at the hotel, waiting. Yeah. _Yeah._ Jim would already be there, waiting in the alcove near the conference rooms, waiting in that "I don't have all day here, Sandburg" bullshit way he sometimes had, broadcasting his impatience, paradoxically — and enviably; Blair sure as hell couldn't do that himself — through silent immobility. And wearing that suit.

Yeah. _Perfect._

It would be perfect. Jim would be there, waiting in the mostly hidden alcove Blair had discovered so fortuitously during last year's AAPA conference. Blair would cross the Park-Hilton's lobby with its huge glass chandeliers and red-uniformed bellpersons and ride the elevator two floors up, but this time, when he walked rapidly down the plushly carpeted hallway and slipped into the shadowy recesses of that alcove it wouldn't be to duck the importunate Dr. Fensler. This time it would be to meet Jim.

Jim. Who'd be standing in the farthest corner of the alcove in the dim light reflecting in from the hallway, leaning casually against the gold-striped wallpaper and looking completely at home. Looking…perfect, with his tie perfectly tied and adjusted and that perfect half-inch of white cuff showing at his wrists beneath the sleeves of his suit jacket. Looking _perfect_.

And looking impatient: uninvolved, uninterested, bored. Classic Jim impatience.

And when Blair knelt in front of him without saying a word, just knelt and undid Jim's belt and unzipped his fly, then unbuttoned the bottom of his pristine white shirt and pushed it out of the way, Jim wouldn't react. Even when Blair pulled Jim's beautiful cock out through the slit in his boxers Jim wouldn't react. Not yet.

Not until Blair laid his hand — the hand that hadn't just slipped inside Jim's boxers to wait in a loose _on-your-mark, get-set_ circle around the base of Jim's cock — onto Jim's thigh, carefully, and leaned forward and took the head of Jim's cock into his mouth with even more care and gently flicked his tongue against the tip. _Then_ Jim would react. With a single aborted, almost inaudible sound, his head moving back to rest against the gold stripes, his hips moving forward briefly before he controlled them again, his hand finding the top of Blair's head, fingers tangling in Blair's hair.

And then —

No, wait. _Wait._

Somebody would be coming down the hallway toward them. They'd hear voices getting closer — too close. Too late to move. And he'd never thought of himself as an exhibitionist, at least not since his sophomore year and that really fucked date with Darla Mazetti, when her roommate had unexpectedly shown up trailing half the dorm behind her for an impromptu pizza party at a critical and nearly terminally embarrassing moment, but this was seriously _hot_ , kneeling here with Jim's cock still in his mouth while people were walking by a couple of feet away, only a stumble or a too-sharp glance away from getting an eyeful.

 _Seriously_ hot, even if he wasn't going to out Jim, even just in a fantasy — too much like tempting fate, shit — and so nobody would stumble or look too closely into their shadowy corner, and the voices would go by without pausing. And he'd be gulping air in around Jim's dick and feeling giddy, the way you felt when your horse came in at long odds and your entire semester's tuition had been riding on its back right beside the jockey, or the way you felt when you didn't end up as the newest notch on the most recent friendly neighborhood serial killer's belt, but only by the skin of your teeth. Or by the skin of Jim's teeth.

Jim. He was getting sidetracked here and he needed to get back to Jim. To Jim's cock and to some judiciously applied suction, and to getting Jim so far gone he'd lose it and start fucking Blair's mouth in beautiful, helpless urgency. Just like Blair wanted him to be doing.

God, yeah.

Beautiful. Just beautiful. Jim's face would be so beautiful, lost in what Blair was doing to him. And he'd have one hand still tangled in Blair's hair, the other pressed hard against the wall, and his breath would be sobbing in his throat, too quietly for anybody else to hear but Blair would be able to hear it. Oh, yeah.

And when Jim shuddered and shot, then sagged back against the wall, panting, Blair would somehow keep from letting out the groan of satisfaction and need that pressed against his belly from the inside. And he'd get to his feet, ignoring the my-turn demands his dick would be making and never taking his eyes off Jim.

Jim wouldn't be watching him, though. Not yet. He'd be catching his breath, still leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. And when he opened his eyes he still wouldn't look at Blair; he'd concentrate on putting himself back together: concentrate on easing his dick back into his boxers, on rebuttoning the bottom of his perfect white shirt and tucking everything in, on zipping up, refastening his belt, straightening his tie. Shooting his cuffs.

His face would still be flushed, but not a hair would be out of place on his head, nothing would be out place anywhere; his shirt blindingly white and uncreased, his pants and jacket unwrinkled, looking untouched. Smooth. So smooth… _Except for me_ , Blair would think, watching him. _Except for what I do to him._

And then, finally, Jim would look at him again. And he would smile, the smile that always killed Blair, the sweet smile that was so full of…full of —

And shit, this was fantasy — he could take a left turn into the wholly impossible if he wanted to, borrow Scotty and the Enterprise's technologically dubious transporter to get them the hell back to the loft in two seconds flat, and the moment the loft door closed behind them he was going to —

Wait. Wait, wait; forget Scotty. New plan.

Jim would smile at him, yeah. Like that. God, just like that.

Then he'd pull a room key out of his pocket and put it into Blair's hand and close Blair's fingers around it. And he'd murmur, "In five," and then he'd walk off down the hallway.

Oh, man, _yeah_.

In five. And a room key. For a room. Where Jim would be waiting.

Waiting, exactly the way Blair would've been hoping he'd be waiting — stretched out on the king-sized bed, his back propped up against the headboard, and still dressed; everything but the jacket and his shoes still on, only his collar button unbuttoned and his tie loosened. The curtains to the balcony would be open, and the late afternoon sun would glint off the waves in the harbor below and glint off the cufflinks at Jim's wrists and practically glint off Jim's blazingly white shirt.

And Jim wouldn't say a word. Not yet. He'd just lie there silently watching Blair look at him. Then he'd start smiling again, but this time he'd be smiling the dangerous smile that made you feel caught between the devil and the deep blue sea and so fucking glad to be there, whatever it might end up costing. Blair would start walking across the room toward the bed, toward that smile, and Jim would kick him in the ankle — surprisingly hard for not having any shoes on — and then Blair would —

Wait — Jim would kick him in the ankle?

Jim would —

"Earth to Sandburg."

Oh, shit. Blair felt his face grow hot. Or hotter; it'd probably already been a fairly revealing shade of red, and there was less than no chance that Jim wasn't completely aware of the current state of the nation under the grillwork on Blair's side of the table. Hopefully nobody else was.

"Uh," Blair said, and stopped. And grabbed his coffee and downed nearly a third of it in one hurried, sacrilegious gulp.

"Do I even want to know?" Jim sounded amused, but the edges of his voice were rougher than they'd been a few minutes ago. Or however many embarrassingly long minutes ago Blair had embarked on his spontaneous imaginary assignation at one of Cascade's higher-class bastions of the hospitality industry. Shit.

"Maybe. Later," Blair said, a little raggedly himself, around another gulp of coffee. "You got biscotti, huh? What kind?" He poked with feigned interest at the paper bag Jim had plunked down beside his El Nino. Distract, derail — himself, anyway. Although if Jim's voice got any hoarser, distraction might not cut it.

"Cinnamon hazelnut and chocolate raspberry," Jim said repressively, without glancing at the biscotti bag. "And no 'maybe' about it."

He was strongly tempted to stick his tongue out at Jim. Keeping it G-rated might be a problem at the moment, though. He cleared his throat instead, although that was more necessity than conscious substitution. "Maybe," he said.

Jim's eyes narrowed, gleaming the way — okay, one of the ways, the way too many ways — that did serious shit to Blair's limbic system. "Or not," Blair added. Jim was so easy sometimes. "Give you a clue," he continued, trying to look as detached as Jim had looked during their non-existent encounter in the alcove at the Park-Hilton up until the moment Blair's mouth had laid claim to his dick. "The suit stays on after we get home."

Oh, yeah. For a long time after they got home. And certain parts of it could stay on even longer.

And the last thing off was going to be the shirt. He could see Jim wearing that shirt into the shower, the water plastering it against his skin, the smooth white fabric turning nearly translucent, and getting stubborn and clinging — something Blair could totally understand — and only reluctantly letting itself be peeled away so that Blair could have the back of Jim's sculpted shoulders, the hard planes of Jim's chest, to himself…

"You intend to pay for the dry-cleaning or you plan on floating another loan?" Jim asked. Gleaming eyes, and voice hardly smooth at all now. _God._ "You're going to be racking up some major debt here if you're not careful."

"Hey, it's the American way. We're a credit-driven society," Blair said, curling the fingers of the hand he had resting on his thigh into a fist tight enough to ache — _distract_. It helped. Not much, but it helped.

"You should know." Jim glanced at Blair's half-drunk coffee and the bag of biscotti with the corner of his mouth quirked up and that light in his eyes that wasn't doing anything to help matters on Blair's side — underside — of the table.

But crap — he was a self-directed human being, right? And in control. Of course he was. No matter how Jim looked in that suit, no matter how much the sound of Jim's voice, when Jim's voice sounded like that, got to him. He made himself unclench his fist and waggled his eyebrows at Jim. "I'm good for it."

"Occasionally," Jim said, a wicked grin spreading across his face as one of Blair's Doc Martens connected with the side of an Ellison spit-polished black loafer under the table.

At least the ankle count was even now. And — self-directed person that he was — he _was_ in control. Absolutely. Blair wrapped both hands around his coffee cup and took a sip this time instead of a gulp. Even cooling off, it was the best coffee Cascade offered. The biscotti they could have later tonight or at breakfast tomorrow, but this coffee deserved to be savored slowly, deserved to be —

Oh, fuck the stupid coffee. "I'm parked a block down on Alameda," Blair said, standing up with deep gratitude that the jeans he'd happened to put on this morning were the ones that always seemed to defy the physics of laundry and emerge from the drier half a size larger instead of smaller. That the sweater he was wearing was long and loose didn't hurt any either. "You coming?"

He rolled his eyes as Jim's grin widened predictably at that. Jim lifted his cup for another swallow of what had to be pretty tepid Sumatran by now and settled back into his chair. "Some of us have staying power, Junior," he said with a superior air, and slowly and deliberately shot his cuffs.

And fuck every inch of _that_.

Blair raised his eyebrows. "But some of us," he said to Jim, digging into the front pocket of his jeans and pulling out the keys for the Corvair and letting them dangle from their leather key chain, "have the keys."

He turned and headed down the sidewalk toward Alameda and the Corvair. And grinned to himself as he heard chair legs scrape across cement behind him and footsteps begin to catch up. _Staying power._ Right.

And when they got back to the loft, he was taking those cufflinks off with his _teeth_. Maybe the shirt, too.

Eventually.

 

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**Tamsin Street, 1700 block**   


"Jim, gotta put it down for a second."

Jim had already begun to lower his end of the desk to the sidewalk; Blair’s breath had hitched badly a moment ago, which wasn’t a reassuring sign when you were holding up half of the world's ugliest 300-pound ebony roll-top. "We've made it all of two yards, Chief. At this rate, it'll take us till next week to get this thing to the truck," he grumbled, but he was already around the desk and reaching for Blair's arm, without much cooperation from Blair, who was trying to shake out a cramp in his hand.

"Let me see a minute," Jim ordered. Mr. Independence ignored him, and he had to capture Blair's hand in mid-flail to begin massaging the spasming muscles and tendons.

"Ow, ow, ow…"

Ah — _there_. Jim felt the cramp ease and heard Blair gave a hiss of relief.

"Crap, that hurt." Blair reclaimed his hand and eyed it balefully for a moment before pulling a rueful face. "Too many blue books last night, I guess."

Well, that was fucking true.

He hadn't said that out loud, but Blair rolled his eyes anyway and said, "I made it up to you this morning, didn't I?"

Jim considered rolling his own eyes, but narrowed them instead. Accusingly. "You fell asleep."

"I did not."

"I was there, pal. You fell asleep." And drooled into the pillow, while Jim's morning wood sent frustrated messages to his brain and Jim contemplated enemy action against the blue books, letting his hand appease his dick as he considered half a dozen ways Blair could make this morning up to him after he'd managed to finish making up for last night.

He smiled to himself. Between last night and this morning and the desk, he was golden.

"Did not," Blair muttered, sounding more like a petulant eight-year-old than an adult. The truth stung, clearly.

Did too, Jim thought, but kept silent. For now. He'd get the last word later, when it counted.

If he played his cards right, he could milk all of this for weeks.

Sandburg flexed his hand experimentally and transferred his attention from uselessly defending his virility — underneath his protests, Blair had to know he was blowing it out his ass — to the desk. He chewed his bottom lip. "You know, this thing looks a lot bigger out here in the daylight. You think we have any hope in hell of actually getting it into our elevator?"

"What I think is that we're making a detour to Schraedinger's on the way home and renting a dolly, which I can't believe I let you talk me out of doing in the first place, and it's going into that elevator even if I have to make the elevator bigger with the help of a sledgehammer."

Blair frowned. "Schraedinger's? You're already spending too much on this desk, Jim."

"Probably. But ten extra bucks for the rental isn't a big deal."

"It's the principle of the thing." Sandburg's frown deepened. "And 'probably'? Hey — yeah, sure, I want the desk, but I told you it's too much; you don't have to —"

"I'm buying you the desk. I want to buy you the desk. I can afford to buy you the fucking desk; you know that," Jim said, glaring at Blair. "I was referring to good old Fred," he jerked his head back toward the display window of Beatty's Antiques, "who's currently in there cackling 'There's one born every minute' to himself. But if it'll make you shut up already about how much the desk cost, you can pay for the hand truck."

Blair raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay. You'd never let me live it down if you got a hernia from doing this, anyway. It's just too bad Fred already lent his hand truck out to somebody else."

"No, he didn't. He was lying, Chief," Jim said. "He just wanted to make it as hard as he could for me. The old fart doesn't like me — disappointed the hell out of him when we were going through the doorway and the desk slipped and just missed smashing my fingers against the doorframe; I heard what he said under his breath."

"Oh, come on."

Jim raised his eyebrows and Blair gave him an exasperated grimace. "Well, if you hadn't threatened to cite him for a couple dozen penny-ante city code violations, the two of you might have gotten off to a better start."

"I'm a cop, Sandburg. It's what I do. And we need to get moving; we've still got nearly a block to carry this thing."

This time it was Blair raising his eyebrows. His silence was eloquent.

"Fine. You're right. I should've double-parked. Abused my authority and slapped the Official Business card up onto the dashboard, or made Parking Enforcement's day and let them write me a ticket." Jim eyed the curb near the storefront sourly. Too late to pull the truck up and double-park now; the beat-up Metro that'd been parked near Beatty's door earlier had been replaced by a freshly Turtle-Waxed Suburban, and the convenient yard-wide gap that'd existed between the Metro and the adjacent Corolla was now a six-inch sliver of free space that was going to have the Toyota's driver turning the air blue if he had to try to maneuver out of it.

He rubbed the back of his head and switched his scowl from the curb to the desk. "Can we get this show back on the road?" He refrained from adding, "Before this oversized waste of innocent tropical hardwood can start mutating or spawning or whatever the hell else it's capable of," but only because if he insulted the fucking thing too much before they got it loaded onto the truck Sandburg would insist they take it back to Fred's Fleece Shop, and Fred would enjoy offering to buy it back at half-price or less — _See the sign by the register? 'You buy it, you bought it. No Returns.'_ — just a little too much. He let his scowl travel to Sandburg. "Sometime today?"

"You're the one who's standing here talking." Blair gave his hand a final flex as he moved to pick up his end of the desk again. His eyebrows were still speaking volumes, but that was easy to ignore.

It was less easy to ignore how awkward the desk was to carry. Why he'd let himself fall for Sandburg's pie-in-the-sky claim that they'd be able to borrow a hand truck from Fred Friendly —

"Damn," Blair said, grunting with effort as the desk swayed. Jim suppressed a grunt of his own; all the hours that he put in at the gym every week and that Sandburg didn't required him to show at least that much self respect. Blair gave another annoyed grunt and muttered, "Handles would've been a nice design touch." He directed a dark look at Jim. "Don't say it."

"Not saying a word, Chief." It wasn't necessary, not when it was clear that Blair was hearing the words Jim wasn't saying perfectly well.

At least they were making forward progress, even if it was irritatingly slow; they were almost up to the coffee shop now. And why the hell couldn't Coffee and Me — Jesus, who thought up these names — have been open Monday afternoon when Sandburg had run out of gas on this godforsaken block of Tamsin? Blair would've made a beeline for a caffeine fix; would've had one of his yuppie latte grandes and schmoozed harmlessly with the counter help and the other coffee junkies and his laptop while waiting for Jim to get done in court and come rescue him like some kind of Amoco Premium-bearing St. Bernard, instead of killing time at Beatty's Antiques.

Or there could've been a bookstore nearby. Blair wouldn't have ended up inside Beatty's in that case, either.

Or Sandburg could've had a hamster for a pet as a child instead of a desk. Not that Jim would let a hamster into the loft, even for the sake of Blair's childhood nostalgia —

No, he just let apes into his home, not hamsters. You had to draw the line somewhere.

The desk swayed again, and then lurched forward and down too quickly for Jim to react. He registered Blair's yelp of pain an instant after he heard the reason for it.

Oh, God.

Blair's foot. Jim was only dimly aware of the split seconds it took to drop his end of the desk and reach Blair, who was trying to shift the motherfucker off his foot but doing it one-handed and awkwardly. Jim slid his right arm between Blair and the desk and got his hands on both corners, lifting and shoving the desk off to the side. Almost in the same motion he latched onto Blair's arm, the arm Blair wasn't shaking out frantically as he wobbled on one leg while trying not to put any weight on his injured foot. "Goddammit, be careful!" Jim snapped. Now that it was too late.

"Yeah, yeah, my hand cramped again, I couldn't even — oh fuck, that hurts." Blair was white. Fucking blue books. Fucking desk.

Fucking stupid —

"I still want the desk, Jim," Blair said, his voice thick. "I want it. Okay? Don't shoot it. Ah, shit."

"Don't tempt me," Jim muttered. If Blair bit any harder on his lip he was going to draw blood. He thought about easing Sandburg down to sit on the sidewalk, but the coffee shop a few yards away had a couple of dime-sized tables and several plastic chairs sitting out on the sidewalk, and he aimed Blair toward one of the chairs instead.

Even after he got Sandburg sitting down with his injured foot propped on the seat of another chair Blair was still trying to shake out his hand, so Jim grabbed it and started working out the cramp. At least he could provide some immediate relief for that; he couldn't do a hell of a lot for Blair's broken foot except get him to an ER.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck…" Blair was rocking back and forth minutely as he sat; his cursing was nearly inaudible now. Or would've been to anyone else, but to Jim it was loud enough that he had to work to keep it from drowning out every other sound in the universe except for the pained hitching of Blair's breathing and the too-rapid cadence of his pulse.

Why in God's name had he decided he had to buy Sandburg the stupid desk? Just because Blair had spent two months living somewhere with the desk's apparent clone when he was a kid and had turned it into some kind of symbol of something — just because Sandburg hadn't had a pet as a kid, or a desk of his own, a home of his own…

After all, those things didn't seem to bother Sandburg; they only bothered Jim.

The stubborn cramp in Blair's hand finally capitulated; Jim felt it release underneath his fingers, and Blair blew out a relieved breath. "Oh, man," he said shakily. "Thanks… You know, I'm suddenly a lot fonder of the Schraedinger's idea. I think I've got a ten in my wallet."

Jim ignored that. The desk could go fuck itself, with or without a dolly. Now that the cramp had been taken care of he needed to move his first aid attentions elsewhere. "Gonna take a look here, Chief," he warned, crouching next to Blair's injured foot and beginning to untie the shoelace. Why the hell hadn't he insisted Sandburg wear his hiking boots? Moving heavy furniture, for Christ's sake. Both of them knew better than that.

"No cast. I am not doing a cast," Blair said, starting on a fair imitation of Lamaze breathing. "It's just bruised, right?" The final words came out through gritted teeth as Jim finished untying Blair's Nike and eased it off the already swelling foot as gently as he could.

The sock was a joke — he'd thought he'd managed to quietly replace all of Blair's oldest, thread-balding socks months ago — and no barrier at all to feeling the fractured metatarsals, the thin painful cracks he'd heard when the desk had hit Blair's foot. Non-displaced fractures, they felt like, so probably no surgery. But still, shit.

"Cast, babe. Sorry."

Blair groaned, his face whiter than ever after Jim's removal of his shoe and careful reconnaissance, and Jim squeezed his right knee. He nodded toward the coffee-shop door. "I'll get some ice to put on this, then I'll bring the truck up."

"I can walk," Blair said hoarsely. Lied, hoarsely.

"You can keep your ass in this chair, is what you can do," Jim said, with emphasis. "And no deciding to play tough guy and hop over to the curb when my back is turned. I don't want you making this worse, or falling. You got that?"

Blair grimaced, but nodded. And he was in enough pain that he might actually obey a direct order for once.

Fucking over-carved piece of —

"The desk. Shit. Jim, we can't just leave it here."

"Works for me," Jim said. "I'll worry about the desk after we get your foot x-rayed and fixed up and I get you back home, pumped full of the good drugs." Or tomorrow, Jim thought. Or never. That was six hundred dollars' worth of lumber he never particularly wanted to look at again, unless he was using an axe on it to turn it into fireplace fodder.

"Jim, we can't just leave it on the sidewalk. I want the desk, all right? A little ice on my foot, I'll be fine while you get somebody to help you move it somewhere safe or get it in the truck or something. And hey, I promise I won't even complain about having to go to the ER. Just take care of the desk first, okay?"

Fucking sense memory — every time he looked at the desk, if he let it into the loft, he was going to hear the sound of Blair's bones breaking; was going to see him sitting on this dirty plastic chair, face white with pain.

"C'mon, Jim. Please?"

Face white with pain and eyes turned up to maximum beg. "Not fair, Chief," Jim muttered. There wasn't much Jim could resist when Blair said 'please', his eyes begging like that, and Blair knew it.

And he was going to whine about going to the ER no matter what he promised.

And he needed that ice on his foot.

But before Jim got up from his crouch he cupped Blair's jaw in his hand. This stretch of the sidewalk was temporarily deserted except for the two of them, but Jim wouldn't have cared, anyway, not at this moment. He felt Blair lean into his touch and let his thumb trace the line of Blair's mouth; felt the heat of Blair's breath as Blair parted his lips, and then a tiny delicate lick of flame striping his skin as Blair's tongue flicked across his thumb. A tiny, delicate lick of flame.

Or a bonfire; might as well be. Leave it to Sandburg to press any advantage.

"No fair," Jim said again softly before he stood, then bent to press his lips against the bitter taste of pain in the sweat beading Blair's forehead.

Blair's hand found his wrist and wrapped around it, the way Blair often wrapped his hand around Jim's wrist, unaware, when he was on the verge of coming. His fingers would be trembling then too, his whole body trembling — but the right way, not from hurt, like this.

"Take care of my desk and I'll let you sign my cast," Blair said, in a voice that was trying, uselessly, to not match the distress the rest of his body was broadcasting, aiming at being irresistible and achieving…well, achieving —

"And hey," Blair went on, his fingers still a living cuff around Jim's wrist, "take care of my desk and I'll make it up to you for this morning — not that I did fall asleep, I'm totally not admitting that, but whatever you want for a bribe, man; the sky's the limit."

"You bet your ass it is," Jim murmured against Blair's forehead, and Blair gave a small, amused, pain-filled huff. His fingers tightened momentarily in their circle around Jim's wrist then slid up Jim's forearm a few inches, smoothing across the skin, and Jim kissed his sweaty forehead one more time, and straightened up.

And sighed. The kid behind the counter in the coffee shop looked strong; maybe he could help move the fucking desk.

 

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**Belmont Avenue, 1500 block**   


The bus pulled away from the curb with a long belch of diesel fumes. Blair rubbed the back of his neck with one hand before he hefted his backpack up by the strap and slung it over his shoulder. Crap, he was tired. At least he'd get the cast off his foot soon, before summer really got settled in. A fiberglass walking cast was better than the plaster of Paris and accompanying sling — and broken arm — that'd deep-sixed his hopes of playing Little League in Copper Falls when he was ten, but it was still a pain in the ass.

And a frequent bone of contention, considering how much Jim and various worrywarts at the PD seemed to think it limited what he could do — what they _said_ he could do — and how seldom he actually listened to them. Jim was probably going to be even more relieved than Blair when the cast came off.

But that was still a week away and standing here brooding about his foot's fiberglass straightjacket wasn't getting him anywhere. Certainly not getting him to the gym, and Jim, and their Friday night plans.

The gym was almost at the far end of the block from the bus stop, which figured. Blair sighed and started walking. He was halfway down the block, admiring a cherried-up '65 Mustang optimistically parked in a tow zone, when he realized he was about to pass the F-150, and he fumbled in his pocket for the spare key so he could dump the backpack.

He paused when he pulled open the passenger door, breathing in the familiar scent of the cab: obsessively maintained vinyl and plastic and fabric, with a faint overlay of Jim. If he were Jim he'd be smelling a dozen other things too, of course. Including sex. Stale sex, by now, nearly twenty-four hours later; funky.

Well, if driving around with the smell of funky stale sex bothered Mr. Clean, Blair didn't have to blow him the next time they were sitting in the parking lot at the Jags stadium waiting for the traffic to clear out after a game. Totally optional.

Right. Blair grinned at himself. _Or not._

He dropped his pack onto the floor of the cab, slammed the door shut, and walked on toward the gym, feeling less tired suddenly. No backpack, that definitely helped. Or maybe it was thinking about last night.

It'd worked. Crap, it'd _worked_. It'd been easy to maneuver Jim into parking under one of the big oaks near the back of the parking lot — the oaks whose branches cast such helpful pools of shadow from the parking-lot lights — with a little dissimulation about trees and air quality that Jim hadn't really bought but had surrendered to anyway, rolling his eyes. And after the game it'd been equally easy to distract Jim into rehashing the fourth quarter instead of starting up the truck and joining the cars heading for the lines at the parking lot exits.

He'd nearly blown it, though. It'd been safe, he'd _known_ it was safe, and yet he'd been almost too chicken to do anything when it came down to it, when their section of the parking lot was completely empty except for them but there was still enough of a traffic jam in the front half of the lot to keep stadium security busy for a while.

 _Almost_ too chicken.

"— just lucky Anderson didn't hit that three-pointer." He'd ended the sentence with a quick intake of air and plunged forward, hoping he didn't sound nervous. "Hey, nobody's around, right? Nobody can see us?" But nervous or not, he'd barely waited for Jim's confirmation — with its accompanying sarcasm about just how long they were likely to be stuck there with nobody around while they waited on the exits to clear, and whose fault that was — before he had his hands on Jim's zipper and his head down right where he wanted it, and Jim was saying, "What are you — _Jesus_ , Chief," and letting out the first of a series of highly gratifying groans.

Sure, they'd done stuff in the truck before. Safe stuff — talking, groping, one fast hand job Jim had given him a few months ago, pulling the truck into a deserted alley when they were supposed to be on their way back to the station after collaring a suspect… Okay, _mostly_ safe stuff. And it'd been great, all of it. But _this_ — Jim's cock was always good, the best, but going down on him while they were in the truck; in public, sort of…shit, he almost hadn't lasted long enough to get Jim started, much less to bring him off.

Or to bring himself off afterwards while Jim watched. Which had also been totally hot: scooting back to his side of the truck and sitting with his ass slid forward and his feet propped up on the dashboard, unbuttoning his fly and doing himself with Jim's eyes on him and the taste and feel of Jim still strong and clear in his mouth…

No chance of that tonight, at least not in the truck, since they didn't have tickets for the game. And the playoffs were almost over — but hey, baseball season was in full swing; maybe he could talk Jim into driving up to Seattle for a Mariners game. Or two. Or three.

Crap — maybe he should be watching where he was walking instead of thinking about stadium parking lots. Until he got this cast off, at any rate; taking a header after catching the heel of the cast in a crack in the sidewalk would give the "You Can't" worrywarts ammunition he didn't really want them to have.

But he'd caught himself with just a small stumble, and it wasn't really his fault anyway. Jim's usual hangout didn't have much in the way of windows, but Rico's was closed this week with the funeral in Texas for Rico's dad, and this stand-in gym had huge, brightly lit windows. Those windows were blocked only by the gold "Cascade Fitness" lettered across the top of the plate glass; the weight benches and trendy-looking machines and trendy-looking people using the machines were in full view of the sidewalk.

And so was Jim.

Blair stopped when he reached the window where Jim was and stood there on the sidewalk, watching him lift. However much weight Jim had on the barbell, it was enough to make the muscles in his arms swell hugely and his chest heave with effort. Jim's sleeveless army-gray tank — no designer workout wear, not Jim — was dark with sweat, and his lips and cheeks moved in a deliberate, forceful, suck-it-in, blow-it-out rhythm as he breathed through his mouth; lowering the bar, raising it, lowering it again.

Lowering the bar, raising it, lowering it again; his muscles straining, his skin running with sweat.

God. _God._

Jim's arms were trembling; not much, but Blair could see it. This time, after Jim lifted the bar, he dropped it onto the stand. Safely…and crap, Blair hadn't even been thinking about that, Jim free-lifting without a spotter, damn him —

Three college-age kids walked slowly across the sidewalk between Blair and the window, wrapped up in some kind of discussion about a summer poly sci seminar . They stopped, arguing, right in front of Blair, and he moved sideways impatiently until he could again see Jim. Who was sitting up now, his chest still heaving, wiping the sweat off his face with a towel and looking out through the window straight at Blair and smiling a little.

They were supposed to go out to eat: Chelsey's, fifty-cent draft and killer wings and decent burritos, big-screen TV, game two in the playoffs. Or not. "Don't shower," Blair said under his breath, raggedly, to Jim, "don't change. Just get your sweaty ass out here and take me home, okay?"

He wasn't tired at all, not anymore. He stared into Jim's suddenly intent eyes, waiting until Jim's head moved in a brief nod, then wheeled and headed for the truck; unlocked the passenger door and stood there, leaning forward onto it with his eyes closed, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window.

Then the night air was overlaid with the sharp smell of Jim's sweat, and a hand burrowed under Blair's hair to curve against the nape of his neck, palm hot and damp, and trembling a little, like Jim's arms had been trembling on that last lift.

"Chief," Jim said quietly; not a question.

Blair let himself lean back for a moment, fitting his neck more closely into Jim's palm. "Home," he said to Jim again, scraping the word up from somewhere around his navel. "Now. Please."

The truck cab would be filled with the scent of Jim's sweat, and the thin jersey shorts Jim was wearing would be clinging to the hard muscles of his thighs, almost as damp with sweat as the gray tank he had on. His hair would be still be standing in short spikes from being towel-rubbed roughly and he'd still be breathing just a little hard, like he was right now, standing behind Blair.

Yes. God, yes. He'd talk Jim into those Mariners tickets later; he needed to be home, with Jim, right now.

 _Now._ "Jim," he said, because neither of them was moving. "Jim."

The hand slid from the back of Blair's neck and trailed down his spine, paused at the small of his back, eased lower for just an instant, and then it was gone and Jim's voice came at him from the other side of the truck. "You going to stand there all night, Chief?"

Hoarse. Good.

 _Lowering, lifting. Muscles straining, skin running with sweat._

Blair opened his eyes and reached for the door handle. Home, with Jim. _Now._

 

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**Alder Street between Soucey and Hamblin; Cameron Park**   


"Honey," Blair said. And smirked.

Jim had known it was coming the moment the first 'Honey' had come out of the witness's mouth. By the sixth 'Honey', he'd casually put his hand on Blair's shoulder and squeezed it, not affectionately. So now he just smacked his juvenile partner on the back of his juvenile head and kept walking toward the truck. "I could have said stagnant pond water, Algae Boy."

"Words guaranteed to get you action, little buddy." Blair was still smirking and Jim cuffed the back of his head again.

"Sandburg, all I need to do is look at you and you're begging for it. I can say — or not say — anything I want." Their momentary privacy on the sidewalk was about to be interrupted from two directions at once, and Jim said that just barely loud enough for Blair to be able to hear it.

"In your dreams, man." Blair answered, without bothering to lower his voice. He'd put his sunglasses on as soon as they left Mrs. Callaway's apartment and they hadn't yet traveled halfway down his nose, where they'd be ending up any minute now, so half of the scoffing line of his eyebrows was hidden by the frames. Not that Jim needed to see Sandburg’s scoffing expression in order to _see_ it.

Jim adjusted his own sunglasses, out of reflex rather than necessity, since they always stayed where he put them…unlike certain other things in his life.

"Just wait. You'll be the one who's begging." Blair said darkly, and Jim realized that he'd started smirking himself.

"Never happen." That wasn't even remotely true, whether you were talking past, present, or future, but it never hurt to crank up Sandburg's competitive fire. And Blair plotting ways to make him beg… Hell, it was Saturday, and they'd wrapped up most of the weekend's chores this morning before they'd hit Casa Juanita for lunch. Now that they'd finally managed to find the elusive Mrs. Callaway at home and she hadn't been able to give them any useful new information to work, they had plenty of time to kill.

"You only think you're tough," Blair muttered, still darkly, and Jim could practically see the wheels turning inside his head. The weekend was looking up.

They just needed to get back home, give those wheels inside Blair's head some privacy to make use of. Jim found himself lengthening his stride despite having to avoid a growing number of dog-walkers, Frisbee-carriers, and city-trapped nature worshippers sharing the sidewalk and the postcard-perfect August afternoon with them as they approached Cameron Park. The truck was another block farther along, unfortunately, down a shady side street; his fault for wanting to park in the shade instead of in the full-sun spots that'd been free right in front of the witness's apartment.

But on the plus side, even though Sandburg was now nearly having to jog to keep up with Jim, he wasn't saying a thing — no curiosity and no complaint. And that had to be because he was too busy planning ways to make Jim beg after they got back to the loft to even notice Jim's increased pace. _Good._

"Jim, wait."

Or maybe that'd only been wishful thinking, since Blair grabbing his arm and pulling him to a halt as they were about to pass the wide sidewalk that served as the park's main entrance certainly wasn't going to get them home any faster. _Not so good._

"You can write up the report later, right? It's too nice a day to spend any of it in the station. Besides, it's your day off."

Fuck. Sandburg didn't look like he had anything on his mind now other than catching a few rays and running a tally on the best legs on display in the shortest shorts, or maybe crashing somebody's game of touch football, and Jim sighed.

Blair ignored the sigh except to ratchet up his smile to about a seven on the Sandburg wheedle scale and add, "Let's get some ice cream. My treat."

Jim raised his eyebrows at that, and Blair released Jim's forearm and whapped Jim's biceps with the back of his hand. "Hey, I buy." He looked aggrieved. "Sometimes," he conceded, when Jim didn't lower his eyebrows.

And spending time in Cameron Park with the entire Fenton Heights neighborhood wasn't anywhere close to Jim's hopes for the afternoon's immediate future, but he let himself be drawn into the park toward the small crowd of ice cream seekers in front of the Baumann's cart anyway. Blair didn't buy very often, after all. Especially sixteen-percent butterfat ice cream.

They ended up with an extravagant three scoops of peach in a cone for Sandburg and his own double-scoop cup of amaretto fudge ripple, and Jim had to admit to himself that he intended to enjoy every spoonful, even though they were now walking farther on into the park instead of heading home to privacy. But it was a necessary delay in this case. Allowing Sandburg to eat anything as volatile as an ice cream cone in the truck was just asking for pain.

"So," Blair said, speeding up to get in front of Jim and turning to walk backwards and talk face to face, apparently trusting in some kind of radar — or Jim, more likely — to keep him from running into anything. His sunglasses were halfway down his nose and he was peering up at Jim over the rims with a suspiciously guileless light in his eyes. A smooth, glistening swath traversed the top scoop of his ice cream like a virgin ski run, courtesy of the single swipe of tongue he'd given his cone as soon as the clerk had handed it over; a ski run with chunks of peach scattered along it.

Chunks of peach. Peaches and cream. Peaches and…wait a fucking minute. Peaches and _honey_ , for Christ's sake. He glared at Sandburg, who usually went for mocha chip.

"So." Jim didn't put any question into the word — it was suddenly all too clear that the wheels in Sandburg's head hadn't stopped turning after all. And it wasn't hard to guess what direction those wheels were heading in, and with half of fucking Cascade hanging out in the park keeping them company. The shit.

"So," Blair repeated, this time into his ice cream as he let his tongue flicker out for a quick circle around one of the pieces of left-behind peach. "I smell like honey, huh?" There was a hint of laughter in his voice, and a pretence of innocent inquiry, and he dug the sliver of peach out of the ice cream with more tongue action than was strictly required.

The four-star shit.

First things first, though. "You're about as romantic as a sack of potatoes, you know that?" Jim said. If he hadn't been so distracted last night, he'd never have let that 'honey' observation slip — Blair really _was_ about as romantic as a sack of potatoes, and Jim hadn't ever intended to give his unromantic partner any unnecessary ammo.

Blair didn't look even slightly abashed by Jim's comment, naturally. Jim didn't expect to be successful with his next statement either, but he might as well go down fighting. He cleared his throat and added, untruthfully, "And it won't work," as Blair licked another stripe off his cone with a swirled flourish that went straight to Jim's cock.

"What won't work?" The laughter in Blair's voice was closer to the surface. A rollerblader went by in dopplering crescents of sound, and a couple with a baby in a stroller was approaching from the other direction. Which might have been a useful distraction, if it hadn't served to point out that Sandburg looked more innocent and guileless than the baby did and that was clearly unfair to everyone concerned, except for Sandburg himself, the shit.

But if one distraction doesn't work, you try another. Jim concentrated on his scoops of amaretto fudge ripple for a few minutes with determination.

Or attempted to; Baumann's made an amaretto fudge ripple worth a hell of a lot of savoring, after all. But by the time they reached the footbridge over the stream bisecting the park, Jim's spoon was scraping the bottom of the cup and he didn't remember eating anything after those first couple of mouthfuls. He could've described every single meeting that had occurred between Sandburg's tongue and Sandburg's peach ice cream, however. In detail.

Blair turned around as they crossed onto the footbridge, giving Jim a momentary break. Not a particularly helpful one, since even though he and his dedicatedly active tongue weren't facing Jim any longer, he'd stopped to look down at the stream below the bridge and was leaning forward a little with his elbows propped on the railing, and that was providing Jim with an all too attractive view of his underhanded ass. Didn't help much that he was wearing a pair of 501s so old and worn Jim could practically see through them.

Hell, he probably _could_ see through them, if he tried.

Fuck — look at something else. He claimed the railing next to Blair and deliberately sent his attention down to the clear, fast-running water. But peripherally he could see Blair's sunglasses riding farther down his nose, see Blair frowning as he pulled them off and slipped them into his shirt pocket. And he could also see the resultant squint at the sunlight bouncing off the surface of the stream. They really needed to tighten up the hinges on those frames before the next sunny day.

He latched onto the thought gratefully; it helped deflect his attention from barely there jeans and peach ice cream and the devious wiles of his partner. Surprisingly, Blair pitched in to deflect him further, saying meditatively, and without a trace of innuendo, "We ought to go camping again the next weekend you get off."

"No argument from me." Jim answered. Maybe Blair had finally decided to have a little mercy. He hadn't actually been wiggling his nicely displayed ass any, after all, not even subtly enough for only Jim to see. And since it couldn't hurt to encourage Blair in anything that didn't involve ice cream, considering how public a park this was and how long the walk back to the truck could end up seeming, Jim added, agreeably, "Fishing's always good."

Blair leaned forward a little more into the railing and hit on his ice cream cone again with a painfully slow-motion curve of his tongue around a nickel-sized piece of peach. So much for mercy. "Oh, yeah. Absolutely," the world-class shit said when he'd finished his porn scene with the lucky chunk of fruit. His voice still sounded implausibly meditative. "It was good at Snowshoe Lake."

And that was fishing which had nothing to do with Bomber Model A crankbait or ten pound test line and was just about as subtle as the show with the ice cream, since what had been good about that weekend last month hadn't been the fishing; neither of them had coaxed a single bite from any largemouth whatsoever, and Blair had spent Sunday morning alternating between spells of being mocked by the nine-pounders the lake was supposed to be teeming with and wandering off along the surrounding trail to check out the scenery from nearby vantage points.

"Braver now that it's daylight, are we?" Jim had tossed at him, the first time Blair'd put down his rod in impatience and headed off for some exploring.

Blair had turned and grinned at Jim, a grin that had nearly changed Jim's mind about trying to outwit the goddamn paranoid fish. "We do a threesome, man, I'm kind of hoping it doesn't involve _ursus americanus_ ," he'd said.

"Christ, you're a wimp. Where's your sense of adventure?" Jim had replied, laughing as Blair cheerfully gave him the finger before vanishing around the first bend of the trail. Vanishing from Jim's eyes, but not from his ears; he had no intention of telling Sandburg, but he'd kept his hearing and his sense of smell casually ballooned out around Blair during his hikes. If there was anything in Blair's neighborhood larger than a squirrel, Jim had wanted to know about it.

Not that he'd really expected Sandburg to run into anything dangerous. But just in case there'd happened to be any psychotic, hostage-taking forest rangers in the vicinity. Or overly friendly fellow campers, male or female.

Or even bears.

 _"There aren't any bears around, right?"_ They'd pulled the sleeping bags out of the tent the night before and stretched out on them near the campfire and Blair had asked that, half-laughing, warding Jim off with flying, bear-shaping gestures of his hands as Jim propped himself up on an elbow and leaned down toward the hollow at the base of Blair's throat. The hollow was nearly hidden by the collar of Blair's shirt and the tantalizingly small amount of skin Jim could see there was alive with flickering light from the fire. "There aren't any bears, or…" Blair had paused to fend Jim off again, "or a troop of Boy Scouts — or mosquitoes, if this is going to end up with either of us exposing any additional skin, or —"

Jim had pounced then, muttering, "It'd better end up with at least one of us exposing a little additional skin. And soon," and felt Blair's laughter against his lips as he pressed his mouth hungrily onto Blair's. Then he'd pulled away — not easy, never easy to stop kissing that mouth, Jesus — but he'd wanted the taste of that sweet spot of skin at Blair's collarbone, wanted the sounds Blair would make as he worked that spot, and Blair had flung his head back with a groan as Jim's lips traveled downwards, baring his throat to the stars, and to Jim.

Afterward, they'd lain side by side under those stars, their clothes fumbled back on in a hurry thanks to the mosquitoes — although, fortunately, not the Boy Scouts or the bears — and Blair had let out a satisfied-sounding sigh. "God. I'm never going back to women," he'd said, mostly under his breath.

Jim had injected a little growl into his voice. "You were planning to?"

"You know what I mean." Blair had lifted a hand and whapped Jim in the ribs with a distinct lack of energy, then his hand had wandered absently across Jim's chest to end up lying curled loosely around Jim's forearm. His breathing had slowed and deepened, almost in rhythm with Jim's, and Jim had smiled up at the night sky and answered, very quietly, "Yeah, Chief, I do."

It had been more than just 'good' at Snowshoe Lake.

Another rollerblader went by on the sidewalk behind them, skate wheels rumbling against the wooden planks of the bridge for a few seconds before the skater was back on smooth cement and speeding farther into the depths of the park. Blair turned around, his back to the stream now and his scheming ass leaning against the railing. His tongue made yet another pass at the ice cream, digging in at the end of the swipe to take along another peach chunk.

More than just 'good'. However… "No argument from me," Jim said again, mildly. "Nice place to relax, too; get a little reading in." Blair could fish all he wanted to with his peach ice cream, but he wasn't going to land what he was fishing for. Not without a little more work, anyway.

Hell of a lure he was using, though.

Blair's eyes narrowed slightly at Jim's reply and Jim hid a smile. But he wasn't merely yanking Blair's chain. He meant what he'd just said. Literally — in some ways, the lazy Sunday afternoon they'd spent not fishing and not hiking and not offering any significant amount of skin up to the mosquitoes had defined the whole weekend for him; those quiet hours Blair had spent reading, and Jim had spent…well, not reading. They'd picked out a tree with a good view of the lake and, and Jim had sat down on the thick cushion of moss at its foot and propped himself against the trunk, Blair settling between his legs and leaning back against Jim's chest. Blair'd had a behemoth of a book with him, one of those with a title that could put Jim to sleep before he made it halfway through the string of self-satisfied four-syllable words printed on the spine, and had plunged into it like a starving man diving into a swimming pool filled with beef stew. Jim had started on his own reading, revisiting his battered copy of _Lonesome Traveler_ , but it hadn't been long before he'd laid the book on the ground beside them, discarding reading in favor of just being.

Just being: idly stretching his senses out into the wilderness, grounded by the warm weight that lay against his chest and pressed along the inside of his thighs. Grounded by the scent of Blair — more Blair than usual, primitive camping being what it was — and by the paced rustle of pages turning, the murmur of Blair's voice offering editorial agreement or argument, or occasionally scorn. Grounded by Blair's hand smoothing up and down Jim's thigh, automatically, in between turning the pages of the book or launching briefly into the air to illustrate one of his murmurings with a flying gesture. And grounded by the small, unconscious shifts Blair made, the firm curve of his ass familiar and friendly against Jim's crotch. Jim had enjoyed the pleasant low-level buzz of potential arousal from that, but mostly, he'd just felt relaxed.

More relaxed than he ever remembered feeling before, anywhere, with anybody. Or even alone.

"Reading," Blair said now, a purposeful gleam in his eyes. "Right." His teeth worried at an edge of the ice cream cone, tearing off a good-sized piece and making slow work of it. Then another piece. Melting ice cream started to ooze out from the remains of the cone. It didn't get far; Blair's tongue darted out to handle the situation with far too much inventiveness, finishing with the kind of potent slurp that could bring a strong man to his knees.

"Jesus, Blair. When I get you home…" Jim muttered, trailing off as Blair popped the rest of the cone into his mouth and chewed, his cheeks working suggestively, then swallowed with showy enthusiasm.

Blair licked the traces of ice cream off his lips and slowly wiped his fingers across his mouth, his eyebrows raised. "Yeah?" he said. "What?" He wasn't trying to hide any of the laughter in his voice any longer. "When you get me home, what?"

Loaded question. Which was a phrase Blair would appreciate here, and Jim almost shared it, anticipating the groan it would evoke and the additional deliberate, teasing swipe Blair's tongue would almost certainly make across his lips; those lips that would taste of peaches and cream, sugar and —

And…

 _And._

He knew exactly what he was going to do when he got Blair home. Christ, yeah.

Not the dark buckwheat stuff Blair used on his crappy bird-grit whole-wheat pancakes or in his strange teas made from twigs and moss — and old shoe leather, by the way they smelled — no, not that honey. The honey from the top shelf of the cabinet: real honey. Clear, bright, gold. Dripped slowly into the creases of Blair's body, glistening on the distended veins of Blair's cock, pooling in the hollow at the base of Blair's throat. Hell, Jim had outed himself to the unromantic shit, so to speak; he might as well indulge himself a little.

Blair was looking at him with his face alive with laughter, caught in the hot golden light of the afternoon sun. He'd missed a small smudge of ice cream on the side of his chin; it was barely visible, a thin, sticky trail of almost transparent white.

Something else to look forward to licking off.

Jim felt a nudge against the side of his foot; Blair's Nike giving a suggestive prod to his Timberland. "When you get me home, what?" Blair repeated. Sunshine glinted off the rippling surface of the water behind his back, glinted off the silver of his earrings, off tiny highlights in his hair as it moved slightly in the breeze. He was smiling. The fish at Snowshoe Lake had been fucking idiots to miss getting reeled in to be on the receiving end of a smile like that.

 _When I get you home, 'what'?_ That had to be a rhetorical question. _Everything, Chief_ , Jim thought. _Fucking everything. Always._

"Honey," he said out loud, and smiled.  
 

 

  
_\- finis -_   


  



End file.
